there are a lot of discussions going on lately and we noticed that many of them are about Quality of Life (QoL) improvements and the lack thereof.
First and foremost, if you are new to the game or haven’t read the devlogs in the past you might wonder why there is feature development, but almost no QoL improvements. The simple reason for that is that when we started the current instance of the universe (alpha test #7) we decided to focus our dev time on developing new features instead of QoL improvements because we never thought that this test would run as long as it has. To be frank, we never thought that we would see players with 30+ bases in this test run. Obviously the tools the game provides are lacking support for this kind of play style.
Here is the deal: We want to know what bothers you the most. For example, we recently found out that quite a few players are upset with the way shiploading works. I asked around in the team and nobody has heard any complaints in that direction before. So, please, put a comment below with one or two QoL improvements you deem necessary or overdue. There is no need for long rants, just a short description and a reason why it is important. I will collect them and we’ll have a poll to see what the community thinks is most important!
Repetitive order automation for a production line producing only one thing.
Why? Biggest challenge is a planet like Etherwind, where I have >10 FPs producing DW fed by >15 Rigs producing water. 5 queue length is simply inadequate for this planet and requires multiple logins per day to maintain.
But this isn’t only a challenge there. This is a challenge on any planet with a large number of the same building that are built for a single purpose.
inventory folder would be pretty nice, or anyway to sort things in an inventory quickly that doesn’t rely on WAR. Could help with the shipping issue where we can have a folder of “I wanna ship this there” kinda thing
days left of consumables in the population screen of the base
Possibly a way to “personalize” notification, like when a base has less than 5 days of a consumables, send a notif. This might feel a bit strong but its something that we can mostly do through sheets
In the same idea, notification for runninng low/out of a consumable in the populous building. This will help a very few but they are the same person with tons of bases…
FIN leading to a financial overview where your cash balances are a further click away. Ideally that first screen should be liquid assets and maybe key figures. SDBR takes up too much space to serve this purpose…
…and SDBR’s list on contracts is a bit useless: it doesn’t take up the full height of the screen and tells you nothing about the contracts (deadlines, partner, etc.).
loop on the queue (when a queue order moves into production, a copy of it is also added to the back of the queue)
loop on entire production line (whenever a production order completes, add a copy to back of the queue).
Base resupply inventory management.
You enter a number of days into a field, it then populates how many of each consumable you need to hit that many days supply for current workforce, and how many of each production input you need for that many days supply given current production orders & queues.
Then provides a button for each ship - clicking a ship’s button attempts to move these amounts listed into the ship from any stores local to the ship (base, WAR). Perhaps check boxes for the items so you can select only certain ones for the ship loading.
(Think this a great way to help address these, even if only 2-3 key priority ones can be done each update think this could make a huge difference)
Empty Ship to Base
Obviously would love full mobile features and such but I feel like an easy improvement would be a button to just empty a ship to first priority inventory.
Save clicks on pc and also enable my supplies to be received when i’m mobile even if i can’t load the ship i can get the base fed or supplied.
Move X amount
Ability to move a specific desired amount to or from a ship
Really annoying having to drag 1s 10s 100s etc of something. Calculating the quickest way to do something can be fun briefly but it loses appeal v. quick
Alluded to by but thought i’d raise it as a formal post.
Consumable micro management, the game shouldn t feel like work :
Imo there s two way of fixing it : a) put a number of days of stock and have the game buy them for you.
b) work out a long term deal with another player. If i produce say chemistry, i don t want to spend my day looking into the fridge or looking at food prices. The ideal would be to reach out to a player producing RAT (or even better have a “service CX”) where i could say i need 100 RAT a day for my base on planet X, 200 on planet Y, i m ready to pay XXXX per RAT to have it done however you see fit, but i don t want you to miss one day, we are committed until next week/month. And the player producing RAT could do the same with the shipping (do it himself or give the problem to another player). We could do it with almost everything and not only consumables. Automate the “chores” if we want and for a price, and choose to focus and the market/trading of the product we deem essential. Have it on a public market to not lock the new players out of the possibility to make a better offer.
And also, i would much prefer having to chat with a couple people every few days to handle my consumables/raw materials, than looks at the market screen several times a day to see if the prices are up or down.
So really consumable micro management and the possibility of having long term contracts.
I think someone’s mentioned this before, but being able to make a shipment of more than 1 material would be nice. For example, being able to combine a shipment of DW RAT and OVE as one shipping contract would help move products around easier. Rather than placing 3 separate contracts and only have hope they all get filled/arrive in a reasonable time.
some alternate ways to move cargo in-out of the ship without click and drag mouse. (maybe a dynamic drop down option from ship cargo to take or dump stuff?)
alternate fuel slide in flight control, user with fat finger + tinny screen = very hard to make precise adjustment (maybe some input box to precisely write how much fuel to consume this trip, like the buy sell box from market precisely quantity to trade)
in mobile vertical view, horizontal space is limited, if you have to many kinds of factory in one planet it get cropped and you need to slide it sideways. the problem is the box row slide independently between the factory name and the actual production que, if I slide it just at the right location, in the Prefab Plant column will show my weaving plant que, and if I slide it back left, the Weaving plant que just black, not the ongoing que or empty box waiting to be filled, just black empty column (this one is low priority, just pure cosmetic problem, no importance)
some source said: 45% user access internet by mobile, I guess mobile friendly interface would be nice
Split queues for same building (e.g. if I have 5 FP and want 3 to make RAT and 2 to make DW I would like to split them into 3 and 2 and have a queue for each group)
Consumables:
Have the population screen show how long the current supply will last
Shipping:
Crates to ship multiple items in one contract (we could use these Crates to make cargo loading and inventory sorting easier as well!)
Map:
Do we really have to click every little dot to find a resource? As long as we know what’s out there an in game search for resources that lists all planets that have said resource would be awesome.
Route Planner: Give us the option to check the route between two planets that a ship would take. STL and FTL fuel usage would be A+ but having to have a ship on point A to know how far point B is…
A search/sorting function on LMs by the following categories:
Shipping --> starting planet, ending planet
Player --> Show/sort contracts by company
Commodity --> show/sort contracts involving a certain MAT
Queue management (In related news, have you ever realized that “queue” is just the letter “q” followed by four silent vowels? Seems like a completely inefficient word. @molp, sorry for the “rant”.)
“Box” shipping (including multiple items in one “box” to ship)
Queue management…some way of dealing with queuing production. Put a whole base of rigs down on Promitor if you want to know what I mean. It would be fine if those QOL was tied in to a corporate or base building in my opinion.
Loading or Unloading an entire hold of items to a planet instead of having to click and drag each one. This is painful if you are running a complicated production chain with a lot of tiny parts like top end electronics. Being able to move a specific number at once would be cool as well. If this worked on mobile it would be a big plus too.
Honorable mentions:
Corporate management (a remove button if nothing else)
Seeing a weekly consumables total for a planet instead of just the daily numbers (for example water is used for multiple settler tiers…would be nice if there was a total per day / per week summary screen)
Shipping contracts for groups of items (again this is related to higher end production chains where you need a bunch of small parts and it is painful to contract each one)
Also being able to refill the fuel tank with a fuel cargo when i don t have a base or a warehouse. Just happened to me right now
And maybe, more warehouses should be available on the CX, if there s only 50 available units and every one can have 3, it s problematic, when the new universe opens, the first 20 players will be able to have their 3 warehouses, but all the other not
A way to load a ship that doesn’t involve clicking and dragging. This is for those of us who sometimes do stuff on mobile, where click-and-drag is virtually impossible.
I would like to suggest the following changes to inventory management:
Ship Inventory: Add load button that is enabled when the ship is at a planet with a base. This brings up a list that looks very similar to pop infrastructure or cogc contribution screen, with items and sliders for each resource in the base inventory. Add a textbox to enter a specific number as well, so that we are not restricted by sliders with poor granularity.
Add Unload button that is enabled when the ship is at a planet with a base. This could either unload all, or open a transfer screen similar to the one I described for loading.
Bonus Points: Add a dropdown to select which inventory to load from or unload to.
Refueling: something similar could be done with refueling, also a “refuel all” button to load up to max fuel from base inventory would be very useful as well.
Why:
This should make it possible to load and unload ships on mobile without drag and drop. This should also make it more idiot proof (for users who don’t understand that they need to drag and drop), and user friendly so I don’t need to drag and drop 15 times to get a specific quantity in the cargo hold.
Please make the POPI consumable sliders more granular? Its difficult to provide just 1 week of materials… Little markers for 1 week, 2 week, 3 week on the slider like on the fuel sliders would help!
