On player workload scaling, or why I am quitting PrUn

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23

Yeah, I agree with MoonSugarTravels. I have dropped out of this Galaxy twice for pretty much the same reason (workload >> fun), even though I maxed out a t much lower level.

I’m cheap/poor, so I play Basic (Grandfathered in from prior Galaxy). By the time I get 5 Bases going, the work def outweighs the fun, so I lose interest.

In prior Galaxy, I got involved in the Great CUOP Scheme, which I found far more interesting than just pushing Mats around. Sadly, it turned out that the CUOP thing really bothered some people who weren’t in on the scheme, and I got a lot of abusive trash-talk for being part of it.

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I’d like to point specifically at click-fatigue as the number one reason for burnout of established players. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s ongoing. I have a ton of passion for PRUN and I think the click-per-action workload being so high is the major source of burnout.

XIT Actions has absolutely saved my life. I’m at 28 bases, and I agree with the sentiment that the game isn’t really playable without PMMG. Others mentioned PMMG, but if you aren’t using XIT Actions to manage your shipping, it’s another order of magnitude improvement.

It’s very similar to what was discussed in this thread: Serialized Contract Commands: An Interrim Solution to the state of Contracts - #5 by Archiel

The OOG auction discord bot means my game looks very different from non-OOG members, but while it simplifies logistics, it adds to the burden of contracts. And it’s a ton of clicks still to modify a contract. You gotta hit save, then dismiss the acknowledgement popup before you hit send, then you get another popup to dismiss. Having extra popup screens when you configure the “conditions” of each part of a contract is a lot of clicks too.

And multi-item contracts are so important to anyone doing ship sales. I know it’s easy to ignore that as a “only 0.1% of players are buying or selling ships”, but it’s also one of the cornerstones of the game and economy.

This is what I do to sell ships, and it’s still rough, even with what I consider an optimal setup:

I really wish dropdowns for mats and users wouldn’t require a click in addition to the text entry. If I copy in the exact username, I still need to click on it in the dropdown for every one of those contracts.

I think a few targeted QOL changes could make a huge difference for a lot of the regular players. I love the game so much, so I have a lot of passion for potential improvements :smiley:

Meanwhile, please look at XIT Actions if you are feeling the burnout. It takes some spreadsheet chops to set up the json strings, but it’s so worth it.

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25

@MoonSugarTravels I can feel your pain.

Also had the same idea

All your points are valid and have been mentioned in paste by many.
Its one of the reasons i stopped growing at a certain point and also stopped doing goverment on Nova Honshu…

Keep a eye on the game and hope to see you back eventually

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26

While I’m still relatively new to the game, even with the dozen or so bases that I manage currently, I can absolutely see where just piling on more bases would increase the amount of menial work one has to do exponentially. I thought you had some awesome ideas for features that could be implemented into the game.

I especially liked the cons packages. Have like a building that packages consumables into like 10d worth of supplies, or even like 20,30d worth of supplies for each pop tier.

Furthermore, the shipping in PrUn can be a bit abusive. Especially when you consider that you are basically forced to logon every day to send your ships out. Take a week vacation and your empire will be in shambles by the time you get back, and you’ll spend the next week or two getting everything back up and running. I realize one of the principles of PrUn was the lack of automation. But there are a maximum of 50 bases you can build hypothetically, even though nobody has actually reached that point. You would essentially have to spend hours in front of a screen just clicking and dragging various commodities to and from ships. As others have mentioned, without PMMG, a lot of the late game would be untenable.

To address this, I like the idea of creating a supply/demand system, where you can build a logistics hub on your bases, then select a commodity, set quantity you want to keep or desire to have shipped in, and then a dropdown for whether it is supplying other bases, shipping to the CX, or demanding inputs from your other bases. Then be able to check a box for your ships you want to activate for your automated logistics network. And you could have these logistics hubs require like LOG as an input. And then your ships assigned to the system would go out and start picking up tasks sent out by the logistics network. Have a page where you can configure a priority list and the desired default fuel burn. For the early game, this is not only unnecessary, but could be prohibitively expensive, but would give veterans a tool to keep the grind to a minimum.

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This post is GOATed. PrUn is extremely tedious to operate despite how engaging the core game is. The issues shared here are why I quit as well.

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