Starting today I’m sunsetting all my operations. I’m not planning this as quitting, more like a break of indeterminate length. I’m writing this message as a summary feedback of my recent experience, and the reasons for this decision - you can think of it as an exit interview. I’ll try to be quick, to the point, and constructive.
The main reason for my “quitting” is the workload, and especially mental load, related to keeping my company running. This effort has grown so much in recent months that it outweighs the fun of the game for me.
I think most of us agree that the game struggles to keep the new player engaged due to how little there is to do early on. I remember my starting days on OF-375b Berthier: I logged in a few times per day to check on every individual AL order completing (and doing spreadsheets to calculate when would I afford another EXT).
It gets more involved soon, true. By the time I expanded to my second base on FK-794b Boucher I had learned to make extensive use of order queues - the first tool the game gave me to make my life easier.
Half a year into my gameplay I went PRO (again) and upgraded one of my ships - the hassle of making frequent trips with the starter 500/500s was getting too much; fortunately the game again had an option for me.
Shortly afterwards I became a PRO regular. The effort of managing production lines on 5 planets - especially if one of them is Nova Honshu and you make 8 different goods in the BMPs there - is just too much. But again the game knew how to help me: recurring orders saved my brain, and I became dependent on them immediately.
A year after I started, I had ~7 bases and 4 ships, and a hefty Excel spreadsheet to manage everything, because the built-in management features and abstractions were no longer cutting it.
Two years in (state as of October 20th) my company is rated #101 in most buildings (at 524), #65 in HQ level (24), #139 in most bases (14), #121 in most ships (8), I also serve on 4 government boards. (Oh and I’m #1 in faction reputation lol.) I manufacture over 40 different goods, which is a lot of work. Sadly, not only PrUn has ran out of options for helping me manage all that, but also it’s all too cumbersome even with my own spreadsheets. So much so, that I would rather not play anymore.
My typical day in PrUn consists of dragging materials from base inventories to ship inventories (and vice versa), and coordinating those ships.
Some of them fly the exact same route every single day or two, e.g. hauling oxygen from SE-648c to ANT. That has became a daily chore for me, because my O output there is ~900/d which means I have to fly a 2k/2k there every 2 days just to keep up with the output. So every evening I load the ship on the planet and fly to ANT, and every next evening I drop it onto the CX and fly back. This has to repeat forever, every day. For every resource extraction or agriculture base I’ve got (that’s 6).
Other bases are more complicated to run, e.g. my OF-375c Adalina, the core of my business, requires providing a wide variety of materials regularly as I’m making all Bfabs, Lfabs, Rfabs and Afabs there (and don’t forget the workforce upkeep stuff). It’s not “difficult” or “challenging”, it’s just Many Square Boxes to drag. The same DW, RAT, OVE, COF, …, GIN, VG; LST, NL, PG, …, NR, NG boxes. All the time, over and over again. I’ve got 3 STOs there (for a total capacity of 16.5kt), but the planet eats about 850-900 tons in mats per day, which means I could only stock it up for 2.5 weeks, assuming I had the hauling capacity for that (850t/d is a 3k/1k shipment every 3.5 days - let’s keep that in mind).
That’s of course assuming I knew how much of what to bring. Easy for foodstuffs (WF buffer is helpful), but for production buildings? Fortunately I’ve got an Excel sheet for that (don’t hate pls, I built it before Prunplanner became a thing) so no biggie. I’ve got to watch it all the time though, actively monitoring how many days of PG do I have left etc. - and that’s a chore.
Overall, I feel that the game’s QoL and management mechanics haven’t been able to keep up with the development of my company. Having a base that makes a lot of something means the player has to now devote more of their attention to it. Having a higher tier base that makes something complex using a higher tier of population means the same thing (but differently).
My current sentiment is that, at some point, growing your company further does not bring more “fun”, but requires more “work”.
This work has become too much for me.
Here I will touch on a few specific points that contributed to this decision. In some places I will share my vision how this problem could be fixed ideally, but don’t treat those as suggestions, it’s more of a perspective thing: “imagine if the game looked like that; do current systems compare well?”
I will enumerate them for easier referencing in case a conversation arises, but the order isn’t really important.
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[workload] The necessity to manually launch every single flight, especially on the routes that repeat day after day after day, feels similar to the experience of having no recurring orders. Having some ability to abstract this repetitive process away (“recurring hauls”?) would greatly alleviate the pain.
Imagine you could tie a ship to a recurring haul between two planets, flying in regular intervals and executing simple tasks like “take all the FEO from here”, “dump all the FEO there”. Sort of a “pipeline” that connects your empire tangibly, letting you abstract away all the daily clicking. Of course it would be behind PRO, maybe require the HQ to be expanded with a special “Logistics Headquarters” available at say HQ level 15, with a pipeline count cap that depends on the level or something like that. But just as a real CEO doesn’t talk to each of his drivers individually, we too need a tool to abstract those low-level orders away!
Further, imagine that a CX sell order was not a static, immutable thing that you have to remove and repost every time you deliver more stuff to the CX. Imagine it as an inventory that you could unload your ship to. Finally, imagine a pipeline that binds a ship to “take all the O from here” and “put it on sale on the CX there”. -
[workload] The current max size the ships can be also feels insufficient (but wouldn’t matter with the pipelines suggested above). If I could expand my 2k/2k to, say, 10k/10k at the expense of flying 5x slower, I’d be the first to do that. Of course there should be larger STOs available to compensate for less frequent flights on the planet size, I guess. But heavier flights = less flights = less workload =
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[mental load] Keeping track of planet-level material balance. There’s 24 POLs on my Helion Prime base making PG and EPO in 6:1 ratio, and also 5 LABs making TCL, THF and NR in 28:2:11 ratios (btw this is not a contrived example but genuine ratios I was running). I’ve got 2063 carbon in base storage. How long will it last?
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[mental load] Keeping track of company-level material balance. Every day my Helion Prime base makes 4266 PG, which then should go to 5 other bases: 1572 to Adalina, 1739 to Nova Honshu, etc, leaving me with a net positive of 858 u/d. PrUn has no way of telling me any of those numbers. Basically everyone has to use PrunPlanner at some point, or cook up their own spreadsheet (like I did in my early days, gradually evolving it as my company grew), both options requiring extra work at least to set up (cause you have to input all the information about your company) - that feels to me like something large missing from the game.
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[workload] Material drag-and-drop. So my Excel told me I need to haul 500 DW and RAT, 50 OVE, 40 COF, 110 KOM, 550 TCL, 250 EPO, 350 C and as much H as I can fit on my next trip to Nova Honshu. This is at the bare minimum 27 drags-and-drops. Alternatively I could use the mother of all clunk “AMT” buffer which requires double confirmation upon entering the desired amount (and that’s three clicks, because the “amount” field isn’t active by default so you have to highlight it manually; EDIT: it’s actually four clicks, as the MTRA buffer won’t close itself after I’m done).
For someone who has used AutoCAD at some point in their life, this is just obnoxiously convoluted. In most CAD software, you often need to draw a line of certain length; you hit a keyboard shortcut for a line, click the starting point and drag in the desired direction, which causes a small entry box to appear near your cursor. It is active by default and shows the current length, and when you enter a number and hit enter, the line is drawn at this exact value. Now imagine this for material drag-and-drop in PrUn. -
[workload] Production order management. Imagine a production queue for a set of BMPs that makes the following nine goods: PE, MCG, OVE, PWO, EXO, PT, REP, SEA and OFF. This is at least 9 items in the queue, but possibly more (as perhaps you want to make PE for 50% of the time, and only a little OFF, so you’d like to enter 4x 20 PE orders to each 1 OFF, and so on) - in my case it was 15 orders.
Now imagine you want to make a bunch of STR real quick, say 100 units, so 10 orders of size x5. Moving them all to the top of the queue will take you literally minutes. Why no drag & drop in PRODQ? -
[mental load] Higher tier workers are not “more fun”, they are only “more work”. My decision to “quit” PrUn came during my push to start making electronics. I planned out and started a small base on VH-503c that employed every worker tier except pioneers. Providing those workers with everything they need plus luxuries, requires bringing 21 different materials to that base. It doesn’t make sense to bring only some of them - it is economically strictly required to bring them all. So as a player, I think of them as a collective “workforce upkeep”, not individual mats. However, I still have to keep track of their consumption rate individually, buy them individually, load them on my ship individually (see 5) - even though them being separate entities bring literally zero meaningful gameplay experience for me at this point.
I’d pay a hefty surplus for a new material: “EUP” for “Engineers Upkeep Package” that would consist of 100 DW, 70 FIM, 5 MED, 2 HSS, 1 PDA, 10 GIN and 2 VG - so 10 days of full upkeep for 100 engineers (if I’ve done the math right). Put the recipe into a BMP or somewhere, let people make it commercially and let me pay them for taking this mental load off of me. And of course similar packages for other tiers. -
No endgame. In the end, if there’s a nice enough carrot in front of me, I’m going to jump through all the hoops. I’ve always had something more to do in the game, something to save towards, a reason to make money and reinvest it in exciting ways. But having made Afabs completely vertically, dominating one (small) market, governing 4 planets… I feel like by now I’ve experienced everything the game had to offer (except high-end electronics, touching which led me to quitting and this post). Point is, I’m sitting on 100kk in various currency right now, but the game offers me no new ways to have fun; only more work.
(I can’t stop giggling at this though: look how obvious it is that the game is German in origin
enter that meme about a forklift driver coming back from work, launching Forklift Simulator to chill out haha)
To reiterate and make my point of view clear. The issue is not that there is a lot to do in the game. It is that many mechanics of the game, when multiplied by the number of bases, ships and buildings the player has, start taking a lot of time as you grow. Say I have half an hour a day to dedicate to PrUn - and that is a considerable amount to spend on something daily. As a late game player, most of that precious time window is wasted on all those low-level activities like moving material boxes from place to place and micromanaging ships. I’d like to do more exciting stuff, but by the time I’m done with all this janitorial work, I have no more time nor energy left for it. This, I think, is the root of the problem.
While I outlined a few potential solutions above (without thinking them through, mind you), the key insight I wish to convey here is that PrUn could and should do a better job at gradually abstracting away lower-level activity as the player grows. What is fun to a newcomer, can become overwhelming after a year.
Thanks for reading this far, I hope this was in some way valuable. I wonder if other large players feel a similar way. I’ll stay for a few days/weeks to finish outstanding business, and participate in any conversation that might arise in this thread.
TL;DR late-game logistics in PrUn is a super-chore and drove me away from the game.
