Revised Proposals - QoL

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Hi all, I have been pondering the various ideas we kicked around - and wanted to share some revisions to the basic ideas - in terms of what would be quality of life improvements for senior players, but are balanced in what the proposals do - and with some consideration given to the (assumed) coding required.

1)Ship sales :: I understand and agree with the reasoning for why we don’t want people selling ships in the game, but selling the parts to another player which takes a crap-ton of contracts - is a serious issue for older players. So what I would ask the Devs to consider is when you start a shipbuilding project in a shipyard (NOT an upgrade) - that we add a box for the owner of the ship upon completion - so this won’t allow for general ship sales - but would eliminate the need to have so many contracts to sell a ship. It won’t help with STL only ships - but I suspect this might be an easy way to implement this improvement from a coding point of view.

  1. Save time on click/drag :: I think the ability to have a different window for transfers of materials - a simple popup that allows you to pick the “from” and “to” then allows a text field so you can enter a list of materials (DW 40; RAT 50; COF 5; etc.) to improve the transfer of materials - this would likely require a moderate amount of coding effort - you would need to have an error check and decide what to do if there aren’t enough of a material to move. This ability should probably be allowed when you hit HQ level 15 or 20.

  2. Create a new item called “Pods” - it is sort of like a cargo bay without a ship - people put stuff in it or take it out like any other ship - the difference is that other players can pick up the pod and transfer it to a different location. I was thinking that maybe instead of a cargo bay - we have a ship part called a “pod rack” - which gives the ship the ability to pick up pods. Each pod has a nominal volume (which doesn’t change) - and an actual weight (based on what is put inside it). This would be a way to encourage shipping because you wouldn’t need multiple contracts for all the various pieces - you can use it for all the consumables, etc. I wonder if this would be easier to implement rather than multi-item contracts or the “shipping contrainers” that have been proposed before. I conceived it as a data structure similar to ships - but not sure exactly if that would work with your code.

  3. The ability at maybe HQ 20 - at a specific CX warehouse you can designate a list of materials and quantities - any material over that quantity is automatically sold when you execute the list. The materials are automatically sold at the market price.

  4. I have gone back and forth on the AI use for ships - but I do think that the AI module should take up space in the cargo hold based on the number of lines of instructions you want to use. But If the loading of ships is simplified I am not sure if we need to automate where the ship flies.

I hope these refinements of the earlier ideas will help you decide how to do things based on code usage. Personally, I would love to see the first two implemented as quickly as possible to avoid anymore attrition among senior players (and to save me some time on supplying bases - it is really a drag to have to move 50 different materials into one ship for one base - and do it every week - when the materials are always the same).

-Craftsman

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While i like number 3, (very much like containers from EVE, and have talked to other players about it in the past), i cant support any ideas 4 and 5 as these can cause too much player automation and requires a coder skillset. Prun already has a small community and implementing these will make super optimized, marginal profit automated setups that coders can make will push both older players without this skillset and new players (who are still trying to learn the game) out of the market as they cant compete, thus shrinking the player base and leading to the decline of the game.

For idea 1, i think a complex contract system would need to be implemented which i support, being restricted to the preset contracts they have sucks and being able to custom make contracts would really help.

TL:DR. like ideas 1 (needs complex contracts) and 3, but cant support 4 and 5, these are bad for this game imo.

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In general, I have soured on the AI use for ships - I think flying them is a core part of the game and that outside of DarkFuel nobody has 100+ ships flying around. My point with #5 is that IF the community decides to go forward with AI, then there should be a reduction in cargo capacity to offset the ability. (And to be clear - not a big fan of larger freightors - I don’t see that people are building many max-size freightors now - although if that changes I would always support adding a larger size on top.)

For #4 - I wasn’t thinking of it as a code-thing, I was thinking a screen that has five “slots” on it - you select a material and an amount for each slot (maybe the number of slots increases with HQ or some other requirement) and with a button for “execute sales” or something similar - so anyone could be able to use this. Also, maybe time-limit the “execute sales” so you can only use it once a week (or other time period).

Thanks!