In this week’s devlog Michi talks about the dynamic market maker rollout and base establishment fees, and shares a first draft of the shipping route feature.
You can find the full issue of the development log here.
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Could I load SHPT with shipping routes?
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My goodness, that looks amazing!! That will be an absolute game changer.
Shipping routes will be huge for resource extraction bases. I’m really glad to see you taking an approach on this development route - and judging by the comments here there’s quite a lot of interest in it as well!
Some requirements for an effective implementation, perhaps they may be helpful when thinking about what the feature would end up looking like:
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Ability to define what items get loaded, unloaded (whitelist & blacklist work well here)
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“depart on arrival” or “depart when full” flags would be helpful
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Define route\waypoints (such as gateways)
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Complex route support, e.g:
- MOR, unload [all], refuel
- Resource tap, load Oxygen, [wait until full]
- Processing base, unload Oxygen, load Copper, [do not wait until full]
- HRT, unload Copper, load [any whitelist item] [do not wait until full]
- MOR, unload [all], refuel
- When loading items, it is often advantageous to mix heavy and light items. For example, carbon and hydrogen. You can carry nearly a 1:1 ratio of them and get “more bang for your buck”. It would be helpful if load actions would be inclusive of the ability to intelligently load items like this.
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I would add to this the ability to handle loading errors, such as not having enough of an item or running out of space. These should allow for conditional actions based on which error occurred (for example, I might want a ship to proceed if it runs out of room, but wait and potentially notify me if it can’t get enough supply). Additionally, I’d like to see the “wait” command have two forms: one which waits for a specified time, and the other that pauses the route and allows me to interact before hitting a button to resume.
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I’m very excited to see this make the dev diary this week!
My wish list sounds similar to Lowstrife’s, but I would love to have a “load all but” option. For example, I make NCS, POW, and RAD on the same planet. I use all of those elsewhere, but I always try to leave 200 units of NCS and 20 units of POW in place so that neither POW production nor RAD production is interrupted.
Additionally, I think it would be ideal to have an option for a route to suspend itself if it cannot maintain sufficient free space on a planet. When playing manually, I have some bases where I can’t immediately unload a whole ship without overloading my base inventory to the point that it would block outputs. Having the automated ship wait and, ideally, issue a notification to me of what happened would be preferable over the automated unloading stalling production on one of my bases.
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For the ongoing situation, i dont think just dropping the base establishment fee will help. it could be a part of the solution but not the whole one. another way do exclude people would be incredibly high taxes either all the time and refuding the members on the planet they want there, or just making high taxes when they notice theres people there they dont want (and still refunding the people they want). The current high base establishment fee is also used by some corps to grab non resource rich empty planets and get high tier pop for ship construction, software, or A fabs, and i think having space planets with an ownership is ok, but taking a heavily settled planet and kicking everyone out is not ok.
Only done alittle thought in the solution but all i can think of are tax caps, and having the max base establishment fee go down with more bases on the planet.
While I’ve heard rumblings in the past of this being on the dev docket, I am thrilled to see work being directed towards this now. I have a few thoughts on this.
This seems to me to be a step in the direction of expanding on the “empire management” aspect of the game. Currently, players are rewarded for smart economic decisions balancing resources primarily, including shipping capacity. What has always been missing in my opinion is the empire management aspect - allowing players to be rewarded for intelligent planning and optimization of one’s existing empire by creating their own unique tools and mechanism in game to facilitate that. At some point in the game, the vast majority of larger players I know use hub and spoke logistics and third party tools to help manage the rest such as keeping track of buffers among other things such as dispatching consumables, repairs, and/or inputs to bases. The “empire management” in the game is (for now) outsourced to some amazing community tools. I propose shifting the paradigm from a single (gamechanging) feature to a broader modular framework for managing one’s empire.
People familiar with Factorio and it’s “control logic” will know what I am thinking of here. In stead of direct features, I am talking about allowing players to set up their own features using a logic framework that can interact with the game’s mechanics. Being able to create custom buffers and APEX commands.
<event/trigger/condition>
Example: [IF] [Available Storage < x] [] then [trigger shipping route ] []
edit: for some reason my example was trimmed when I posted as well as the “< >” for the template. But the explanation should sufficiently communicate the idea.
Make it modular so you can add conditions, add actions, have action groups be able to interact with one another. I think this would allow players to build up over time their own “management bureau” so to speak for their company. The “automation” aspect of this could be reduced to a list of actions/logic that was triggered that the player has to manually activate. So if a player has set up logic to repair a base once the average age of repairable buildings reaches a certain number of days, once that logic is triggered it shows up on a list that the player has to manually configure and/or activate. Configuration might include things like assigning a ship or choosing a CX to dispatch the repairs from if none are specified in the logic directly.
I mention this because the system can be iterated upon over time simply by adding more commands, logic statement (if, and, while, etc), possible action objects, or more complex filtering conditions to it. Create the shipping routes feature to work with this sort of modularity and over time simply add actions, action objects, triggers, etc to an existing framework in stead of having to create new standalone features.
For shipping routes as lowstrife has already mentioned, the relevant logic would include: Load/Unload/Refuel/Depart/Wait as actions, until full/when empty/when # of larger than or greater than at for conditions, /all/all but x number of for objects, and white/blacklists for filtering. I might be ignorant to the complexity of what I am proposing. But if the feature was built to be modular, intuitively this feels like it could be expanded on over time to include other similar features without having to develop discrete logic/code in every case.
As a shipbuilder, the only way I would be able to use such a feature is if it was highly configurable. Managing limited buffers and highly complex supply chains isn’t really compatible with a simple pickup from and deliver to . Many outputs weigh almost nothing which must be balanced with buffers at sites where they are consumed. Sending a ship to pickup 2 RAG might make sense in some cases but not others. I might want to leave a certain amount of a given material on site for local consumption (capacitors come to mind - needed for both engines as well as field emitters).
Either way, I am positively thrilled to see this feature being worked on! Simulogics ftw.
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Would be nice to be able to set SF/FF usage for the route. Also, is the refuel condition only met if the tank if filled 100%? In other words, if my base only has 20FF available will it throw that in the tank and then take off or wait for more fuel to be available (hopefully with a notification)?
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I would be fine with “completely fill the tank” but then I would suggest a 600 SF fuel tank (I only load 300-500 fuel to save weight).
And it would be interesting to know how you set the trips: “make the trip in X time” (not too great for STL trips), “make the trip with X fuel” (also not great for STL trips), “try to make the trip in X time but use max Y fuel” or something completely different.
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i would think there would be the ability to add load and fuel limits and the ability to tell it to leave a certain amount of stock, otherwise anyone making stuff their workforce uses will not use the feature for those bases.
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