Some things I'd like to see

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Greetings all, and especially the Devs.

I’ve played an uncountable number of games in my life (and I’m not young!) So have plenty of depth to make some creative criticisms.

#1: Flee Play. Sorry, this game is not free in any sense of the word. In order to engage in the MMP part of the game, you need to pay. There is really no exception to this. You cannot play this game only living off of the CX’s. So, either make it FTP, or just make it PTP, and get it over with. I know you guys need to get paid for your hard work here (which is why I am a supporter, and I have also purchased 6 months of Pro), but there are other ways. The best way it to add Ads to the game! (Yeah, I hear the horrified screams from here!) I’m not talking invasive banner ads all over the place, I’m talking about an initial 30 second ad when you log in to the game for all none-pro members. They are forced to spend 20 or 30 seconds of their lives watching an ad, that you are getting paid for. That should help the money situation.

#2: Give access to the local markets to the free to play players. Not unlimited action, but maybe the ability to buy things, and the ability to place 1 or 2 ads on the LM. This will give those free players a real feeling for the game, and will probably get them to stay, and support the game. This will grow our player base, and everyone wins! I might even suggest that there should be a 1 or 2 week delay in this, to stop any unscrupulous play. (and you can always check their IP’s) Also, Free Players should also be able to contribute to a planet’s infrastructure. It makes no sense that they cannot, and that only paying players have to have the burden of upkeep fall on them.

#3: Building Queues. I, and most people I’ve talked to, really dislike how this is set up. I would rather see you start off with 1 free Queue for each production building you set down. So if you set down 1 Extractor, you get 1 Q. Not the 5 that the game gives you now. Which also means that if you have 7 extractors, you would have 7 Q’s. This way, if you have a building that has a lot of different production types, like a Farm, for instance, you can set each farm to produce different product. Maybe give Pro subscribers 1 additional slot, so they can get crazy!

#4: Corporate Wallets and Warehouses. It difficult to run a multi-player corporation in any game, but this game makes it even more difficult! There should be a corporate wallet, where the CO (or other board members) can pay out to individuals for whatever the corporation feels is a good reason (loans, a boost for a player who is selflessly working his butt off for the corp, etc). And, players should be able to contribute to the corporate wallet (to pay back a loan, or whatever). The same thing applies to the Corporate Warehouse. Preferably even layers to the corporate warehouse, so some things can be kept for only the top corp members to deal with, or maybe a lower tier part of the warehouse that is accessible to all members. Have corp officers with the ability to give goods in this warehouse to members of the corp, or to create LM contracts with said goods. This would be a HUGE boon to those in a busy corporation, like the one I am in. You would still need to build this warehouse, but you should be able to build it on any planet where you have corp members. It should be expandable. So maybe a tier 1 corp WH would have 5000 space. You can upgrade it to a tier 2, and add an additional 5000 space. Etc…

#5: Do away with planet limitations. Planets are BIG. There is zero reason to limit the number of players on any particular planet. Now, I understand that with those little planet areas where you can click on to settle in certain places, that you are, sometime in the distant future, maybe, going to make them into some kind of modifier. Make those little areas have additional modifiers the more people that wish to settle there. But it’s pretty irrelevant for now.

#6: Weight limitations for warehouses and ships. This is such an artificial limit. A warehouse on a planet is never limited to weight. The only thing that prevents you from storing things into a warehouse is Space. Volume. That should be the only consideration. The same thing for spaceships. Weight WOULD be a factor in the ship being able to lift/land off/on a planet, but the only reason that you wouldn’t be able to fit it on the ship would be because of Volume. Now, if your ship is only rated to lift off of a planet (or land) with 500 tons, then that would be it’s limit. But that is assuming 1G. SO if you were on a .5G planet, you might double that weight. Or if you were on a 2G planet, you would halve that weight. But that could bring into effect Engine Ratings. Stronger engines = more lift weight. (not sure how complex the ship lift mechanics are)

#7: refitting ships. I would love to have the ability to slightly modify an existing ships. There should be restrictions, but it would be nice if we could modify a ship by maybe 25%. Replace engines. Add a little more cargo space. Those kinds of things.

#8: Player to Player transactions. (or Inra-Corp transactions) It would be really nice if we could trade, Player to Player, without the need to go through the LM. 2 Ships, anywhere where they are together, trading Cargo. I’m not sure how doable this is, with your coding. But I’m sure you can put in a Player qualifier in the regular LM ads. It’s a real pain to try to trade with someone, and you cannot send them a personal ad. You have people accidentally (or not) grabbing your ads that are intended for someone else. It’s all very annoying, and it shouldn’t be. We should be able to place ads to specific people. Or maybe place Corp ads, that only other corp members can see, and accept.

#9: Abandoning Bases. With the hard limits on bases, I really think we should be able to Abandon a base. Especially those people that went all the way to the edges of the galaxy to get AR, on that really crappy AR planet. It’s completely worthless, but now they are stuck with a base out there. Once AR starts getting made on good planets, it makes no sense at all to keep that base. So yes, we really need to be able to abandon bases.

#10: Building Upkeep. I really really really hate the way building upkeep is done. It makes no sense at all. my building is 0.01% damaged, and it now costs me at least 25% of the starting materials to fix it! No sense at all. Here is my suggestion to fix this: First, once you put a building down, you can only get back 50% of your materials. (so chose wisely!) For upkeep, you will need actual money, and MCG’s to maintain the buildings. MCG’s are your regular construction parts for holding buildings together, so they should be the primary form of materials you need to fix them. And, it costs money to keep repairs up. If you fail to upkeep your buildings in a timely manner, they start to really break down. Go below a 90% repair rate, and you might start to lose some important parts, like B-Fabs, A-fabs, whatever. But, if you keep up the maintenance, things should be fine. (I know the repair process is a sink, but it still doesn’t make any sense.)

For the game start:
#11: Planet Access. Some of the things we need are just not available at the start of the game. Starting off as a Fuel guy is almost instant death. We’ve been in the game 3 months now, and we still don’t have access to HE3. I think there are only 2 tier 1 planets that have even a poor concentration of HE3, and they are far away of any of the settled worlds. LS might also be an option, to get HE3, but there is ZERO of it on any T1 planet. AR is another huge issue. Again, 3 months in, and we are just starting to get a small amount of AR. The only T1 planet is an insane number of jumps away, so someone had to finally bite the bullet and make a base there. It took forever to get any leverage on making INS. I think the next time you reset the Universe, you should do a little better in setting up these, so we don’t get stalled out again. Maybe if you made an INS formula that we can make with more easily acquired materials, even if it’s way less efficient to make, just so we can actually get moving forward.

I hope you all liked my suggestions. And I hope it opens up some civil debate. I really enjoy this game, and I would like to see it succeed and and become Prosperous! (see what I did there?)

Edit:
#12: Cancel contracts! Sorry, forgot to add this. But we should be able to cancel an accepted contract, if neither side has accepted anything. (made a payment, put goods on it) It’s annoying that you accidently hit Sell, when you really want to Buy, and someone grabs it before you can delete it. Also, make it so you can give that person back either the money or the product, in case a mistake has been made. Then you can fix it, and cancel it, and it’s out of your list.

4 Likes
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I agree with all of your pointers, especially number 4 we need that one desperately the only one that wouldn’t work is number 5. The reason the player base isn’t there to support that or the planets would be totally not balanced (starter planets)

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Hi,
#8 Player to Player transactions. This would be so helpful, would make it so much easier in interact with players who are in different time zones.

#7 refitting ships. Building a ship is such a complicated and intimidating prospect. But a smaller project to get a little extra cargo space would make a very tempting medium term goal.

Just to mention I’m really enjoying the game.

Thanks,

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The building queue is a real issue. I just made some logistic planning with gozintographs (,Datei:Gozinto.png – Wikipedia) basing on the variable product paths available. Only having 1 queue is kind of sh** - not optimal. And actual I would have needed 1 more slot.

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yeah, it can be hard, if you only have 1 or 2 production buildings. But, you would get an additional 1 for being Pro, and they can add in more as you increase your HQ. I would hope it would be better than 1 for every 5 levels you have now. And they can always put a cap on it, if it gets to crazy. Maybe a Cap at 10. Not sure if we would ever need 10 slots, but I always like to have options! :smile:

But, you would also have more flexibility once you have more than 5. Even as a free player. I have 7 farms right now, and I only have 5 Q slots. So, I cannot make each of my farms produce a different crop. Not without a lot of maintenance, with me constantly going in and adjusting things. So, it’s a trade-off. a little more babysitting in the beginning for less in the future.

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I feel you, but in few points I disagree:

#1 and #2 - not only it’s possible to play on CX only - there’s been times with no LMs and it proves it still works. I like to think it’s an incentive to buy license as #2 is partially assured once paid at least the 1 month fee.

#3 buildings have different recipy outfit, I’d argue you rarely change RIG’s job, but likely often PP1 or BMP’s job queue. buildings like MCA/CLR really benefit from scheduling/planning ahead. shortening the queue for them is unnecessary micro, for jobs that you need to run once and last for 3h.

#8 i understand you’d like to have corp based lm ads? this and other points would be otherwise described in roadmap: Prosperous Universe

#10 if you see 0.01% damaged building - don’t worry about it; the curve is non linear so that you can get close to 100% until it’s time to rebuild; it’s good for planning this way - you can assume for first 6-8 weeks you’ll get time to recoup the investment + then some until you have to do more investments/repairs. this and few other issues you described seem more like a preference, not a real issue.

#4 could be useful, it’s right now managed outside of the game for players that play in corps; could be brought into the game. the lack of such seem to be limiting the value of in game corporations.

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Someone can correct me if I’m wrong. But I believe the higher tiers of HQ upgrade will unlock more queue slots

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The OP has a good list of points, and I’m happy to see that people feel strongly enough about the game to write these posts. :slight_smile: But I also disagree with a few of the proposals, so thought I would add my own counterpoints.

#1. Disagree. It is perfectly possible to succeed in the game as a free tier player - I’ve been playing for free and I’m about to get my second base. I think the subscription model, in terms of what paid players get as an advantage over free players, works well.

#2. Disagree. As above, restricting the LM to paid players seems fair to me.

#3. Disagree. I much prefer the existing production queue system compared to your proposed change.

#4. Neutral. I don’t play as part of a corp, but something along these lines sounds okay to me.

#5. Agree. I can’t see any reason for limiting players per planet. Ultimately, it makes the game more difficult for players who join later, since all the best starter planets will be full. If anything we want this the other way around - it should almost be easier to join later, to help mitigate the feeling among new players that they can never catch up.

#6. Agree. I’ve outlined a similar idea in a different thread, that there should be no weight limits, and that fuel cost should be proportional to cargo weight.

#7. Agree-ish. The fleet management part of the game does feel underdeveloped at the beginning. But rather than having refitting ships as an option, I’d prefer ship trading as a solution to this, as I described in another thread.

#8. Agree and disagree. Having a player or corp filter on an LM advert sounds like a handy idea. But I think that player to player transactions still need to be limited to the LM to avoid COLIQ abuse. Also, this is a minor point, but if you could make direct transfers then you’d get whiny newbies begging for free materials in the chat. I’ve seen that happen once already, and “it’s not possible” was an effective way to shut them down.

#9. Disagree. If it were possible to abandon a base, then as better planets get unlocked, veteran players would leave the starter planets, leading to a loss of community. I think it’s important to preserve that, especially for any new players that join on those planets. However, all starting planets should have some value (see #11 below).

#10. Disagree. The existing repair mechanism may be a little clunky, but your 0.01% damaged building functions perfectly well, so you don’t actually need to repair it until the material ratio is a lot more sensible. I don’t see this as a major issue.

#11. Agree. I really like the game’s concept of having scarce resources at tier 1, and then effectively unlocking higher tier planets through player effort. However, the way it’s been done with AR is questionable. An alternative approach would be to have a trace amount of AR on a starter planet somewhere, such that a 1 unit per day extraction was not commercially viable in the long run, but you could afford to have one building dedicated to that, as a lone player, while a corp could have several members all on that planet, allowing them to get enough AR collectively to then settle one member on a better AR planet, and so on. A good candidate for this would be Avalon (formerly Hortus G) - if it had trace amounts of AR then it would have more value as a starting planet, and players could then get hold of AR in a legitimate but slow way. I’d also like to see HE3 added to a starter planet in a similar fashion. The key thing is to have every starting planet be good for a “main trade” too, so that then after the higher-tier planets are unlocked, the player who went to Avalon first isn’t stuck with a useless base. e.g. if its MAG deposits were substituted for MGS or SIO, this would probably be enough of an incentive to stay.

#12. Neutral. I haven’t used the LM, but this sounds okay.

Hope some of this is useful. :slight_smile:

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Another random suggestion, following on from #11 above, about how gas giants are dealt with. I realise that a lot of the game requires suspension of disbelief, but the way that you can build a base “on” a GG feels like a real stretch. I also think it makes settling gas giants a bit too easy. So I would make the following tweaks:

Rather than floating in the gas, or whatever an AEF is supposed to do, I would describe GG bases as being in a very low altitude orbit, i.e. cruising along a few km above the edge of the gas giant’s surface. The AEF would be rebranded as an “Orbital Platform Foundation”, or “Low Orbit Foundation”, or similar, but would otherwise be treated identically. “Landing” or “Taking off” on a gas giant would consist of moving between a regular orbit and the very low altitude orbit level of bases, so that stage of ship flight is preserved.

Resource harvesting would be performed by lowering a device down into the body of the gas giant, on a tether. This means adding an extra need for an amount of a special material to COL, RIG, and EXT, in addition to their other requirements, for GG planets only. If the material is tier 3, then this will effectively delay the settling of GG planets - currently AEF isn’t a very difficult barrier by itself and it feels “too soon” that we already have some GGs being settled, before cold or low pressure rocky planets. It would be great if there were some tier 2 rocky planets with small to moderate amounts of AR and HE3, which players could use as an upgrade from the trace amounts on tier 1 planets, but without the super yields of tier 3 gas giants.

In order to make GGs into tier 3 planets, the special material should be something made by technicians or above. I originally thought that NFI (nano-fiber) could be used for this, but it doesn’t quite meet the requirement, since it can be made with only settlers. There may already be an existing suitable material which I am unaware of, but if not then you could add a new product “Nano Fiber Tubing” or “High Tensile Piping”, as a construction material to be made in an AML, which can be built and operated as soon as a player gets technicians. The new material recipe could be NFI + KV + EPO, or similar, to encourage production of those. To build the AML you need a source of titanium, so this already encourages lower tier planet development.

All other buildings on a GG would remain the same - only requiring AEF (or the new orbital platform equivalent). But since players would only settle gas giants for their resources, it effectively makes them tier 3 planets as a whole.

You can still have a cold -vs- temperate -vs- hot distinction, since the planet could be a heat source, or not. However, if we’re following the above concept then all GG bases should be low pressure and low gravity. I’m not sure if this would create some late game balance issues. It would at least increase demand for MAG earlier, which seems like a good thing, and add further difficulty to settling a GG in general, which I believe would be beneficial for the game.

In short - make setting gas giants require substantial lower tier resource collection and player co-ordination, but make the payoff greater by having them as the best sources of gases in the galaxy, with some tier 2 rocky planets as intermediaries.

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Interesting additions here. But, with hard planet caps, and no ability (as of yet) to abandon a base, If you need resources, then you need a T3 GG. It’s a waste of time and effort to settle anything less. And GG’s are already massively expensive to settle! Maybe once AR and NE become more available, the prices will drop, but the cost is pretty painful right now, which is why only a handful have been settled, and only those with near impossible to get resources below a T3 planet.

As for all GG’s being low G, I will have to disagree. The gravity of our own Jupiter is so massive, it breaks asteroids apart as they fly by it!

now, going back to the GG thing. I think, instead of settling ON the GG, you would settle on one of the moons orbiting it. (because all big GG’s have moons!) So, you would settle on one of the moons, and your extractors, collectors, etc, would actually be specialized ships, that would skim the GG for resources, and return back to the base. This makes a lot more sense than any other explanation I’ve heard so far. Specialized ships would be able to be built with Techs. Each Launchpad for the Skimmer Ships would take up 20 Area, but you can decide which resource you want to collect with each Skimmer. Otherwise, they would work like any other Resource Building. How much you collect per hour should be tweaked accordingly.

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Thanks for the input! :slight_smile: I just want to make a couple of clarifications though.

The reason that GG bases would be low gravity in my design is because the base is modelled as being in orbit around the planet - so everyone in the base would be experiencing weightlessness. This is a minor point though.

Also, the reason that GGs are currently hard to settle is that all of them are cold, so require INS. And yet as you point out, a handful are already settled. I suggest that this is still “too early” in the universe’s life. My proposal is that there should be some cold rocky planets which are half as good resource-wise as GGs currently are. People would have to settle those rocky planets first, in order to get the resources (e.g. TIO) to settle GGs later.

Currently the sequence is:
Temperate rocky planets → Secret far away temperate GG which is kind of a fudge → cold GGs

I propose:
Temperate rocky planets → Cold rocky planets → GGs

In terms of your skimmer drone idea, I think that’s great! Possbily even better than my dangling tether proposal, since it would require more ship development tech first. So then the sequence would be:

Temperate rocky planets → Cold rocky planets → Ship techs → GGs

The skimmer drones could either operate from a moon base, or from the low orbital base concept. I’m not sure you’d need to have a separate launchpad building though - that seems like extra complication and coding over the existing system. The skimmer drone could just be an additional material component of the resource collector, i.e. in addition to 6x AEF you’d need 1x SKM, which is something way up high on the tree, possibly needing a shipyard type base building to make. This actually ties in with my other proposals to let players make and sell ships as a production career. Wow, it’s all coming together. :yum:

Fundamentally, I think that as the game stands, the epic level achievement is building a ship, while settling a GG is treated as more mundane. I think it would be more compelling if this were reversed. Creating a base on a difficult planet, in order to get significantly higher resource yields, feels like it would be more of a rewarding and high status goal than being able to build a ship that’s actually quite similar to the ships you start with.

1 Like
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What do you mean “his” skimmer drone idea? I proposed that on TwilightSentinel’s game suggestions when it came to orbital bases for liquid surface planets.

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I had no idea this was suggested before, so I didn’t steal your idea, I just also thought of it. I guess great minds think alike!

As far as making the drones actual Ships, well, that would put off anyone settling GG’s for probably 6 months+, which I feel is just too far off. Maybe if there were better rocky planets to settle. And I wasn’t going for a separate launchpad for the skimmers. It would be it’s own specialty building, which would include the drone, which would replace the resource buildings for GG’s. But I do think that you would needs Techs to build this. Tech manufacturing buildings for the parts to build it. I really dislike putting this farther up the chain