I want to get an idea of how the game determines how much gas or asteroids to spawn. I hope it's based on how much a resource has been scooped/tethered/refined, because a static value essentially puts a hard limit on how many spacers the game can support.
For example, let's suppose a pilot uses up 10 kinetic_batteries per real-life day. This means that 10 pilots (using 10 k_bats each, total of 100 per day) will drain the following resources:
diamene (40)
titanium (50)
iriil (120)
stesium (10)
astrium (20)
duramine (10)
If the game's spawn rates are static, then it can't support more than 10 pilots without them inhibiting each other. It's a literal survival of the fittest, and may not be conducive for population growth.
NPC orders and station missions only further add to the demand on the system, and in a way, it's worse because NPC orders take in refined resources, while station missions take "intermediate" products (parts you still need to put together to make an end product like repairkits). This means even less resources are "moving up the supply chain" to make actual supplies that players can use.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
I've given this a couple days, and I have to say, I'm not keen on the station missions. On the surface, I think they are interesting missions, and I would much rather use my autofactories this way than making supplies to sell on the market. And it increases demands for comms, driving up the prices making mining a more lucrative activity.
beyond the surface: Vandium bottleneck. many of the missions require components made with rglass. each rglass requires 8 vandium to make. (and a lot of tritium, but I still have some of that). Nanoplastic also requires 7 vandium for each one. roughly estimating the math, we need more than 250 vandium to complete the station missions currently active.
What this means now that my vandium is out: I log in, if I want to do a station mission I have mine. I've spent hours flying around the sector only to come up empty-handed more than once. Or I spend hours doing hard incursions trying to raise the money to put out market orders at increasingly higher prices. Both of these are fairly attention needed - secluded activities.
Now, miners, they can get their money back by selling to the people with autofactories, but the people with autofactories, well, they just keep spending money. In theory, factions can reimburse them, but where are the factions getting the money? (and a centralized government helps, putting Scatterhome at a disadvantage but I'm not completely opposed to that) Add faction influence to completing the mission and then at least those who do work that way can increase the chances of needed political change happening. But mostly right now, it's just an extremely tedious process with no long term sustainability.
Possible helps: HDS astrium only uses 2 astrium per unit of hdsastrium. If rglass and nanoplastic treated vandium the same way it should help balance supply and demand. Increasing spawn rates of vandium would help too. Why would so many necessary things require so much of something that wasn't in ready supply?
Now, miners, they can get their money back by selling to the people with autofactories, but the people with autofactories, well, they just keep spending money. In theory, factions can reimburse them, but where are the factions getting the money? (and a centralized government helps, putting Scatterhome at a disadvantage but I'm not completely opposed to that) Add faction influence to completing the mission and then at least those who do work that way can increase the chances of needed political change happening. But mostly right now, it's just an extremely tedious process with no long term sustainability.
Here's an idea: make faction stations generate income. Call it trade tax from all the offscreen merchants that dock and move their goods through the station. Obviously the more damaged a station is the fewer merchants want to use it, so more damage = less income.
Now we have an incentive to keep stations operational and in top condition, and also a source of faction income that is not dependant on cosmpiercers or player goodwill/donations.
I've given this a couple days, and I have to say, I'm not keen on the station missions. On the surface, I think they are interesting missions, and I would much rather use my autofactories this way than making supplies to sell on the market. And it increases demands for comms, driving up the prices making mining a more lucrative activity.
I'm actually of the opposite opinion. Player demand should be the driving force behind the economy, so NPC demand like planet orders and station missions should be subpar than producing and selling supplies on the open market.
Furthermore, it definitely increases demand. But in the real world, an increased demand would be met with producers working to increase supply. This is not possible in Starmourn, as far as we know: the increased demand just adds scarcity that cannot be met. People have to do without certain supplies because there's no way to actually produce more and provide for everyone. In essence, it puts a cap on how many active players Starmourn can feasibly support.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
Now that Danica got to 100% station operation, the missions have increased in difficulty by adding the requirement of bots autofactories. We're looking at a requirement for 4 umms, which breaks down to 4 paristeel and 4 nanoplastic to repair the hull by 2%. In materials needed, this breaks down to 20 titanium, 4 duramine, 28 vandium, and 48 helium11 just for one mission, and three autofactories. This is going to be harder to keep up. The good side is that there are more people getting into manufacturing, the cooperation on all parts of the mission has been fun, and the rates of station damage aren't awful. If the goal is to just keep the stations afloat, everyone should be fine for awhile. The downsides are the tedious hunts for the rare vandium asteroids, and the costs into refining, manufacturing, void gate travels, etc. that right now, we're just eating.
I don't think stations need to be 100% to have that kind of mission. We've had tickets for arrays and umm's for days and we're just flailing ineffectively on how to complete them especially without access tto faction marks.
okay, went out for a couple hours today and found vandium. I'm feeling a bit better about things now. Just wish my marks account wasn't draining so fast.
I'm spending more time doing this than I would like. There's a bunch of incursions out there and I'm out flying with a gas scoop behind me and -if I'm lucky- an asteroid on my front. I'M NOT ENJOYING THIS. There's a lot within the game I'd rather be doing, but If I don't do it, just imagine the first impression the newbies will have each time they have to trip twice or thrice before they could move another room within Reynolds Spaceport whenever the station status is sub 85%. I HATE IT. But who the hell am I. I'm not even much of a whale for you guys to listen to.
Station missions aren't all bad, they made the commodity market actually work. Players are gathering and getting actual marks for it. That's fine.
This is where the fun ends. Agree with other peeps saying station missions are:
-Not fun
-Too much of a money drain
This shit is currently a huge hassle that consumes hours of game time daily. There was an update recently that reduced how much damage each mission causes. That was a misplay. The damage per mission isn't the problem, the number of missions is. I don't think the devs realize how much time and ingame cash it takes to manufacture trade goods for each mission. It's at least 5k marks each - doesn't matter if it's 2% or 12% damage, you still gotta do it. It's still marks and money down the drain, which is fine when there's only a few missions but with the number we get right now, that's just excessive.
So my solution is: return station damage per mission to previous levels but instead have less missions spawn over time. Also give factions some advantage to having an undamaged station, not just punish them for a broken down one.
Why do you have to do missions if your station doesn't need the repairs? Song managed to keep Danica at 100% systems yesterday and we were still getting missions - we still are getting missions - but it's more missions than we need to keep Danica repaired.
Basically, I don't see the need to do every mission as it pops up, if your station doesn't need it.
Furthermore, I don't think station missions "fixed" the economy. Less resources can now get to the "end stage" of supplies, because:
some refined resources (elessium, titanium, etc.) get drained into NPC orders (and leave the economy entirely),
some intermediate materials (rglass, UMMs, arrays) get drained into station missions (and leave the economy entirely)
Which leaves...even less resources to get made into repairkits, batteries, astromechs...the stuff that players can actually use, and the stuff that should be the driving force of the economy, since it moves marks from player accounts rather than generating new ones from the system.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
Why do you have to do missions if your station doesn't need the repairs? Song managed to keep Danica at 100% systems yesterday and we were still getting missions - we still are getting missions - but it's more missions than we need to keep Danica repaired.
Basically, I don't see the need to do every mission as it pops up, if your station doesn't need it.
My point isn't that you have to do every mission. My point is that if you have to fix your station, it's cheaper to do it when every completed mission gives you +8% HP, not +2%.
My suggestion is to have missions that are more rare but also more weighty. That means station detoriation in time remains the same but there's less cost (time and money) involved in restoring station status, because you need to run 1 mission to restore 8% HP and not 4. Exact numbers may change, this is just to demonstrate my example.
Why do you have to do missions if your station doesn't need the repairs? Song managed to keep Danica at 100% systems yesterday and we were still getting missions - we still are getting missions - but it's more missions than we need to keep Danica repaired.
Basically, I don't see the need to do every mission as it pops up, if your station doesn't need it.
Because you need to atleast raise status over 85% for it to not be a nuance to everyone there. Which, Scatterhome - where everything is voluntary - is still struggling to keep up.
It's frustrating is what it is. Not only were the requirements so god damn expensive to make, all those efforts only leads to repairing about 2% to 5% of the subsystems? Not to mention, we don't really get anything for doing this. And that miniscule captaincy xp doesn't cut for what we lost. Nothing they gave us returned what we've invested in this. Nothing.
Maintenance staff needs some downtime as well! Currently it appears to be unsustainable. And none of us want a worker revolt for having to overtime. Cranking down the speed of mission appearances would be favorable for now.
Because you need to atleast raise status over 85% for it to not be a nuance to everyone there. Which, Scatterhome - where everything is voluntary - is still struggling to keep up.
I wouldn't participate in this rubbish if I was in Song or Celestine either, to be fair.
If we could partially complete these missions it would help. Like deliver raw materials to the station, or scrounge the shop based equipment. I tried to do a couple and tracked down the shops with the equipment, but then I found I'd need to buy at least 2 autofactories and go gather a ton of materials that are not on the market to build the other parts required, which are also not for sale on the market. I'm just not going to do that. I don't mind the idea of resource gathering, but I've really no interest in manufacturing. IC or OOC. So I'm just ignoring the whole thing and hoping Reynolds doesn't implode.
[Cassandra]: Poet will be unsurprised to learn that she has unread news.
Some of these missions are simply too expensive for how much they'll repair. 3 r-glass for repairing 1% of subsystem? I think that mission's staying there forever. Can you guys PLEASE ATLEAST make the missions non-random? And not include the really expensive comms like r-glass or arrays or sensors?
I've just achieved the PRODUCE 100 honour. And I'm the 13th person to reach it. And I've only just begun since Station missions. So 12 serious manufacturers, before me.
IF they want to introduce player competition, reduce the expense of station missions, as well as the resource cost for producing missiles and batteries so that it becomes feasible to compete with ship forge. We can't start dogfights -much- because it's waaaay too expensive per fight. Especially for newer players to get stuck in.
We'll be clamouring for resources then, to make cheaper batteries.
The problem, in my opinion, isn't the demand: we have plenty of demand, from NPC orders, to station missions, and finally to player orders on the market.
While the shipforge certainly affects the reason why player orders are less profitable than hoped, the major one is that there simply isn't enough material that makes it to the "end stage" (batteries, astromechs, repairkits, etc.)
Just imagine: for 1 astromech, you need sensors, QPCs, UMMs, and arrays. Those, in turn, need rglass, disheets, paristeels, nanoplastics. And those need diamene, titanium, tritium, iriil, asrium, helium11, duramine, and vandium.
For all of those "pre" stages, stuff gets sucked back out of the game when they're used for NPC orders or station missions. There's not enough to fuel a lively economy.
What we get is exactly what (I think) we wanted to avoid): new marks generated into the system (via NPC orders), even more drains on faction accounts (via station missions), and marks from incursions and bashing just not moving between players because the vehicle through which they're supposed to move (the player market) is dry.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
If we could partially complete these missions it would help. Like deliver raw materials to the station, or scrounge the shop based equipment. I tried to do a couple and tracked down the shops with the equipment, but then I found I'd need to buy at least 2 autofactories and go gather a ton of materials that are not on the market to build the other parts required, which are also not for sale on the market. I'm just not going to do that. I don't mind the idea of resource gathering, but I've really no interest in manufacturing. IC or OOC. So I'm just ignoring the whole thing and hoping Reynolds doesn't implode.
This is pretty much my stance on it, too I don't have a lot of play time as it is, so if it's not on the market offers or I can't get it from someone else, I'm pretty much out of doing the station missions -- now, if it was running about trying to find more of the items required, - or like Poet says above, partially completing missions - or a quest thing, I'd manage it. But having to manufacture stuff and fly around and refine and all that jazz? Nope!! I want to play for fun in my short time windows!
Ideally, that's how it would work. Refiners would bring in resources, manufacturers would regularly churn out stuff like rglass, and disheets, and UMMs, and such, and some of them would be readily purchased to fulfill station mission needs.
That hasn't quite panned out as planned, probably because there's too few resources to begin with. But we've noticed that rates seem to be going up and tweaked, so there's hope yet!
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
Something that we could really use is a separate log for all the faction storage actions and the station missions, because they really spam up the log. COMMLOG <org> would be a really nice qol addition.
Comments
Tweaks are being made as the station mission mechanics are developed, but that's how it goes in beta!
- Ilyos (August 2019)
For example, let's suppose a pilot uses up 10 kinetic_batteries per real-life day. This means that 10 pilots (using 10 k_bats each, total of 100 per day) will drain the following resources:
If the game's spawn rates are static, then it can't support more than 10 pilots without them inhibiting each other. It's a literal survival of the fittest, and may not be conducive for population growth.
NPC orders and station missions only further add to the demand on the system, and in a way, it's worse because NPC orders take in refined resources, while station missions take "intermediate" products (parts you still need to put together to make an end product like repairkits). This means even less resources are "moving up the supply chain" to make actual supplies that players can use.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
beyond the surface: Vandium bottleneck. many of the missions require components made with rglass. each rglass requires 8 vandium to make. (and a lot of tritium, but I still have some of that). Nanoplastic also requires 7 vandium for each one. roughly estimating the math, we need more than 250 vandium to complete the station missions currently active.
What this means now that my vandium is out: I log in, if I want to do a station mission I have mine. I've spent hours flying around the sector only to come up empty-handed more than once. Or I spend hours doing hard incursions trying to raise the money to put out market orders at increasingly higher prices. Both of these are fairly attention needed - secluded activities.
Now, miners, they can get their money back by selling to the people with autofactories, but the people with autofactories, well, they just keep spending money. In theory, factions can reimburse them, but where are the factions getting the money? (and a centralized government helps, putting Scatterhome at a disadvantage but I'm not completely opposed to that) Add faction influence to completing the mission and then at least those who do work that way can increase the chances of needed political change happening. But mostly right now, it's just an extremely tedious process with no long term sustainability.
Possible helps: HDS astrium only uses 2 astrium per unit of hdsastrium. If rglass and nanoplastic treated vandium the same way it should help balance supply and demand. Increasing spawn rates of vandium would help too. Why would so many necessary things require so much of something that wasn't in ready supply?
Furthermore, it definitely increases demand. But in the real world, an increased demand would be met with producers working to increase supply. This is not possible in Starmourn, as far as we know: the increased demand just adds scarcity that cannot be met. People have to do without certain supplies because there's no way to actually produce more and provide for everyone. In essence, it puts a cap on how many active players Starmourn can feasibly support.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
Basically, I don't see the need to do every mission as it pops up, if your station doesn't need it.
Furthermore, I don't think station missions "fixed" the economy. Less resources can now get to the "end stage" of supplies, because:
- some refined resources (elessium, titanium, etc.) get drained into NPC orders (and leave the economy entirely),
- some intermediate materials (rglass, UMMs, arrays) get drained into station missions (and leave the economy entirely)
Which leaves...even less resources to get made into repairkits, batteries, astromechs...the stuff that players can actually use, and the stuff that should be the driving force of the economy, since it moves marks from player accounts rather than generating new ones from the system.- Ilyos (August 2019)
We're here to have fun. Period.
We'll be clamouring for resources then, to make cheaper batteries.
While the shipforge certainly affects the reason why player orders are less profitable than hoped, the major one is that there simply isn't enough material that makes it to the "end stage" (batteries, astromechs, repairkits, etc.)
Just imagine: for 1 astromech, you need sensors, QPCs, UMMs, and arrays. Those, in turn, need rglass, disheets, paristeels, nanoplastics. And those need diamene, titanium, tritium, iriil, asrium, helium11, duramine, and vandium.
For all of those "pre" stages, stuff gets sucked back out of the game when they're used for NPC orders or station missions. There's not enough to fuel a lively economy.
What we get is exactly what (I think) we wanted to avoid): new marks generated into the system (via NPC orders), even more drains on faction accounts (via station missions), and marks from incursions and bashing just not moving between players because the vehicle through which they're supposed to move (the player market) is dry.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
I don't have a lot of play time as it is, so if it's not on the market offers or I can't get it from someone else, I'm pretty much out of doing the station missions -- now, if it was running about trying to find more of the items required, - or like Poet says above, partially completing missions - or a quest thing, I'd manage it. But having to manufacture stuff and fly around and refine and all that jazz? Nope!! I want to play for fun in my short time windows!
That hasn't quite panned out as planned, probably because there's too few resources to begin with. But we've noticed that rates seem to be going up and tweaked, so there's hope yet!
- Ilyos (August 2019)