I’ve been inactive since end of January or so, thus my real game age is maybe half-ish year.
A small player doesn’t need more than 2 ships until he gets to 10-15+ colonies. Making ships accessible to a low point would kill any shape or form of shipping industry ( why pay people for shipping when the return of investment for building a ship is acceptable and more profitable? ).
Fear of inequality is misplaced in my opinion.
The likelihood of people that are able to build ships to get involve in shipping contracts is rather non-existent.
So, from the perspective of a player that throughout 6 months I invested in progressing the tech levels rather than getting fat wallet I believe the cost/reward is quite low.
10-15 bases?
Let’s check the low point on that and how you can manage to do anything.
10 Bases, fully done, so around 40 DW, 40 RAT
all bases within 1 day of each other, a perfect circle
Consumables delivery for 10 days
pickup 10x10x40, 4000 DW 4000 RAT
1st ship takes DW, 2nd ship takes 1900 RAT (3rd ship takes 1900)
You need 3 ships to deliver just consumables.
Who will deliver your cargo between bases?
How did you arrive at any player needing just 2 ships until 10-15 bases? Please show me some simple math so I can enlighten myself.
Please don’t tell me other players, because if everyone is forced to do your logic only new players will be delivering anything and only until they are self sustainable at which point they will start posting contracts not taking them.
Also at some point the number of new players will drop and what then? You’ll just multi account and ship for yourself?
Aldin, please provide some formulas that make you believe that 2 ships is enough and that forcing everyone to build everything in game before building a ship is ok.
Also, other issues you have, feel free to voice them in different thread and keep this one about ship building, thx.
My issue of inequality is not that big players will take shipping contracts. It’ll more be they just stop needing to post them and they’ll also have the ability to crash every market price and still make huge profit as they can suddenly ship huge quantities of goods. As soon as someone can reliably ship a whole base of RIGs H2O production off Etherwind there goes any chance of smaller players selling DW.
Yes this will lower overall prices and H2O prices for smaller players which may be good, demand will also grow hugely to match. But the issue is the pull away for large players will be astronomical.
I’m not sure I understand your math. You multiply consumption for 10 days with number of bases and deliver every day to each base and you come to conclusion you need 3 ships?
Why don’t you supply with max cargo/trip each base, this way in 5 trips x 2 ships = 10 bases with 1290 DW/RAT for 30 days. ( I just simplified the import need to fit your example ). So, having this exercise completed you supplied in 5 days 10 bases for 30 days and have 2 ships free for the rest 25 days.
My bases are designed as minimum import/export but it’s up to you how you build and play, however, a 15-20 days supply for a colony is achievable with one cargo load. Assuming you pick all the cargo to a central point of distribution then 30 - 40 fully fledged bases can be supplied by two ships, more or less depending on proximity.
Which “other issues” I should mention in another topic?.
The two topics I listed are strictly related to shipbuilding.
Population siphoning is a direct impact of Shipbuilding where more and more players will eventually tech up to join the race of shipbuilding and have this side-effect.
Worker pool adjustment is related to above population siphoning where 10% of tech/eng/sci in a base exist to serve these migrations or expansions.
I can agree with that @Bobemor but I have no idea what the impact will be and it was proven in past that speculating didn’t work very well regarding market dynamic in this game.
In past rich people used to buy all stocks and relist at insane prices. So, I guess, we will find out.
well… technically as long as they don’t need any imports they should be fine, just cycle where your ships go and take back the exports to a central hub such as the cxs, but you’d have to make every base do everything rather than utilizing them to their maximum capacity. It all depends on what kind of bases you have, i can have 2 bases and not have enough ships because my second base is a full rtap. the converse is also true
I have 20 bases currently and at some times I feel I need additonal ships, but most of the time I get by with them.
I have some corp members doing some occasional shipping for me, but not all that much.
I’m currently building one heavy ore hauler type of ship, because that’s mostly what I need around now, because those metals are damn heavy
I do agree though, that while high end ships should be expensive, I feel that intra system ships should be easier to make, and would only need tech ( and an occasional engineer item ) to build.
This would be small, slow ships on tech level.
We can then expand to better ships ( engineer and scientist level ) to create faster / higher cargo ships.
FTL ships should stay at engineer/scientist lvl I feel.
But making the first intra system only ships available to tech level would help greatly by expanding system production hubs ( because right now, it’s faster to jump out system and back in then travelling through the system ).
The ship to me that makes sense for new players to have some ability to make is an intra-system ship which can’t land on planets. While that is not useful in the current game, once we have space stations and asteroid mining, such a ship would have a niche to fill.
As a returning old player getting a ship would be out of my price range even at the height of my power(where I was pulling in 1 mil/week), and this took about a year of buildup to even get to that stage.
As it stands right now shipbuilding is more a “win-more” mechanic.
Relatively new player here (joined up around Christmas).
I would assume that I’m a mid-range player, not spectactularly brilliant at the game but also not particularly poor either. I’m now getting to the point, maybe 3-ish weeks in, that I’m starting to need to import materials for my own factories (a base on another planet is still in the future, but it’s coming soon). The price of a ship (in materials and/or whole) should be set such that a player at my stage should be able to purchase one reasonably cheaply, if only because soon I’ll need to choose between an income from shipping or the ability to move the resources I need.
Right now ships are so overpriced that the average player can’t even see a point in the game where they might become accessible.
It seems to me that there should be a “used ship” market - where high level players can sell their ships (but also basic low-range ships should be injected into the universe periodically to ensure that the price doesn’t get beyond players).
I think what is needed, is that there be System Ships that can be built, without the FTL drives, that you can make with Techs. To add the FTL element of the ships, you will need Engs and Scis. This will give us system ships to move about the various planets early in the game, but it will take a while to get jump capable ships, to move to other systems. With the CX’s being moved off planet, I think it would be a good idea if the Devs actually looked at this a bit harder. Cheap system ships you can build with Techs would be a good way of making goods hauling in system more viable
Combine BR1 and BR2 into a single BR module, and add 5 Workstations (BWS) to the list of components required
Remove ACS from the STL engines, and adjust STL engine formulas accordingly. I have quoted my suggestions for fixing STL engine formulas from another thread below.
Remove WAI from LIS, WR, and AIR formulas entirely. Replace with something from ELP and/or software dev such as basic AI.
Remove the different size crew quarters recipes and replace with a single crew quarters, but the number of crew quarters scales with the size of the ship.
I would also probably want to remove the BOS requirements for Combustion chamber and replace it with something else, and adjust the Nozzle recipes so that only ANZ and HNZ require AML time.
AML runs perfectly fine on techs. But the building prefabs might need to be scaled down to Rfabs instead of Afabs.
I said it before, and on other posts and the discord.
Make the tech level ships STL only, slow , low cargo ( upgradable , and I like your suggestions that if you want a bigger cargo bay, you will need more STL Engines on the ship ) .
Once the universe get to eng / sci level, we unlock building of FTL ships, and the faster / bigger STL engines
My comment was more about questioning the need for Pyrex (the most commonly known brand name for Borosilicate glass products) in the combustion chambers of our futuristic space engines. Being able to build AML with RFABs would be nice, but I think from a “lore” perspective it is probably the building that makes the most sense to actually require AFABs.
Yeah I am aware, I looked it up as well. It would make sense if it was a component for heat shields, but I’m not aware of any applications it has in engines. With the quantities involved, it seems like the entire combustion chamber/engine is made out of glass.
