Taureen Sector Player Suggestions

[Luna]

I've been asking players in chat what things they want to be adjusted on the new "No mod", sorta Classic style server.

The following were suggestions I've heard from MANY players but I'll name the suggestions made by some specific players I spoke to today. Feel free to agree and discuss so Toonces understands the needs of the players and what changes would help balance the game.

Altair-

1. Lower pollution, it makes it easier to manufacture weapons. Make the WF not need resources to build weapons (uran/equip). This will encourage invasions, and help builders defend quicker. New players will benefit from the ability to fight back by making nukes/defenses to enable them to retake captured colonies. WIN/WIN for everyone

2.More holds are needed for the basic ship mod, which is included. Building needs to be less boring or people only invade and then let colonies die. Give ships double the holds, or a significant increase. This will make it easier for new players to make money faster to compete with players already established.

3. Buildings should take less resources to complete. Build 5 Bio 3's in a row and you'll totally understand why people want this option. By the time you haul in the needed resources, the colony has consumed some of them and you have to make even more trips. This will reduce tedious tasks, that no one enjoys. Get players out there fighting, invading and doing what they love most!

4. Lower pollution, and raise tax per %. Most colonies are struggling to make enough money to clean. Balance it to where colonies can be stable and make enough money to be cleaned. Lack of cash, kills colonies, and keeps players from having enough money to invade and fight.



L.G.STORM-

1. He would like to see all colonies able to reach zounds by increasing the opportunity to get AA. Zounds colonies have decent solar, and make good cash. He reminded me how the old 5k colonies were easy for everyone to invade, and lots of players played when we had them because it was fun.

2. Make building less tedious and make weapons production easier.

The players online this morning on Taureen agreed these were some of the most basic things that need adjusting. The biggest common concerns were the same ones Altair listed. I've heard similar suggestions from nearly every player I've come into contact with.

I suggest you log into Taureen and talk to the players Toonces. You'll find the players want to believe you can and will listen to them about changes that impact gameplay in ways they find the most important. None of this is more than adjustments to existing game play. I told them I would post this and see what we could convince you to address.

[BarbaraWalters]

I'd really love to see an increase in cargo holds for non-mod servers.

Also I love the option for moving resources quickly between planets (f1 and f2 hotkeys) but can you add colonists to the hotkeys? it'd really help

[Khayman]

1. Lower pollution, it makes it easier to manufacture weapons. Make the WF not need resources to build weapons (uran/equip). This will encourage invasions, and help builders defend quicker. New players will benefit from the ability to fight back by making nukes/defenses to enable them to retake captured colonies. WIN/WIN for everyone

2.More holds are needed for the basic ship mod, which is included. Building needs to be less boring or people only invade and then let colonies die. Give ships double the holds, or a significant increase. This will make it easier for new players to make money faster to compete with players already established.

3. Buildings should take less resources to complete. Build 5 Bio 3's in a row and you'll totally understand why people want this option. By the time you haul in the needed resources, the colony has consumed some of them and you have to make even more trips. This will reduce tedious tasks, that no one enjoys. Get players out there fighting, invading and doing what they love most!

4. Lower pollution, and raise tax per %. Most colonies are struggling to make enough money to clean. Balance it to where colonies can be stable and make enough money to be cleaned. Lack of cash, kills colonies, and keeps players from having enough money to invade and fight.



L.G.STORM-

1. He would like to see all colonies able to reach zounds by increasing the opportunity to get AA. Zounds colonies have decent solar, and make good cash. He reminded me how the old 5k colonies were easy for everyone to invade, and lots of players played when we had them because it was fun.

2. Make building less tedious and make weapons production easier.

I feel like I have a bit of a unique perspective. I've just recently come back, so I remember exactly how things were the last time that I was playing. I've also gotten a chance to see, roughly, three years' worth of changes. I've gotten a nice side-by-side view of the game as it was last time I played and how it is currently. I agree with every one of these ideas.

Building is absolutely tedious. Even if you got lucky beyond lucky and found a port that sold every resource and bought none, it still takes hours to bring over all of the resources necessary to get a basic colony functional. Solar, Refinery, Bio2 as a very basic setup. The construction for those projects would take nearly a week. New players can't just go out and get 1k colonists. You're talking hours upon hours of work. Maybe ~6-8 hours of playtime total between getting money together for a ship with decent max holds, getting money for the holds, hauling resources, visiting various ports to take their colonists (As remember...new players can't get many colonists to start), etc. Another maybe 4 hours of killing pirates if you're lucky enough to find them, or maybe doing taxi missions and wasting fuel, to get money to throw a few laser cannons and mines down. Probably won't be enough to defend it, but it's a start. ~10 hours of gameplay to get a basic colony with a solar is ridiculous. Not to mention the wait time as construction completes. New players don't have millions to rush construction, and chances are they aren't going to get gifts. Imagine how tedious it is for vets. Now imagine you have nothing at all and are starting fresh, and it's ten times worse. Doubling or even tripling the cargo holds would be a great improvement to this.

Invading is also tedious and not fun at all. Compound mines are, in my opinion, the worst addition to the game. Invading is less about skill and more about how much money you've got in your pocket. Can you afford to reshield enough times to clear out all the mines? Laser cannons you can dodge and shoot down. Maybe buy surface missiles and take it slow. Mines are just tedious, and they make invading a chore. Nevermind sliding and torping/shooting surface missiles. Just ram yourself into mines for 45 minutes and hope to god that the guy that owns the colony doesn't land and start throwing nukes as you're ramming into the mines.

Colonies need an income boost. Desperately. At my best I had over 1300 personal colonies. I cleaned them all myself, with no help. I wasn't even in a corp, and the corp contractor system wasn't in place when I stopped playing. I very rarely had disasters and every time I'd walk away with 2-3 billion credits that I'd give away and buy tokens with. You can't even get that many colonies galaxy-wide any more. Maybe I've picked bad servers to play on (went for the most active) but 99% of the planets that I land on are fully defended with mines, and have no dome. On The Permaverse I joined the top corp to have fun invading, because they were at war with three of the top ten corps. Sounded like a good time and a way to hone my invading skills, since I was so rusty. I ended up blowing over 4k fuel just looking for planets that weren't dead. Found less than 10. With over 20 players on simultaneously the past three nights, the server is far from dead. Yet, from looking at the planets within 40 hops of Sol you'd think otherwise. There's scattered colonies. Usually only around ports that sell the majority of resources, that way they can get almost everything they need right there. Again, because building is such a chore.

Make nukes and lasers free to build. No explanation needed. Make it easier to get lasers and maybe people will stop relying on compound mines. (Were it my choice, I'd just remove them from the game entirely. Or make them space-only defenses). Make it easier to build nukes and people will be much more likely to invade. Bring some fun back into the game, and remove some of the tedium. Colonies suck up enough resources as-is, and even with harvesting at 100% it's quite difficult (for most planet types) to get a positive balance for all of the necessary resources. So even late-game you still end up having to barge BBQ in to keep the colony going, just adding to how annoying it is. If token nukes were cheaper I'd say screw colonies all together, and just invade for the fun of it.

Improving the NPC AI would also be fantastic. New players starting out have two choices for earning money. Taxi missions and killing NPCs. I can't tell you how many times I've run into pirate hubs. 15+ pirate NPCs in a single system. Nobody can take that many ships on all at once. Trading resources station to station is a possibility, but it's fairly low-profit and the cost in fuel and time taken up is just too much.

As the game sits now, you can't have a good colony. You can't get the colony that you want. You just have to settle for what you can get. You have to make the best of it. Colonies don't excel in a particular area as they used to, because now you have to try to balance harvesting, military, and researching to keep the pollution down and the resources high enough that the colony doesn't immediately run out. If you want weapons in the short-term you pretty much have to burn the colony to the ground to get them because swapping to full military is going to screw your pollution levels and resource quantities.

[duece]

Khayman, I loved reading your post because you make a lot of good points. Especially about the amount of playing time for a new player to get a colony going, I was trying to put my finger on it, but that's may be the number one problem with starport. I've taken to helping this newbie player on taurean sector, as has one of my corpmates. And we were both talking about how, it takes at least a week for a new player to finally get a colony. And when they finally do, it's always some 16k pop ocean that has a weak solar and pollutes more than it makes.

You're experience with building tells me you went about things inefficiently, but that isn't the point. There's no tutorial, it isn't intuitive, and if you don't know what to do already you spend weeks to make colonies that are functionally horrible (if you're lucky enough that it doesn't get invaded). There's no way to expect a new player to figure it out from scratch, but at the same time they have to figure it out on their own. That's the crazy thing, if you take to mentoring a newb, teach them, and advise them. If you share the tricks you've learned over the years (and there's so many), you overload them. It becomes such a clusterfuck that they quit anyway.

To build a colony on any kind of reasonable time frame you have to get an ocean planet with bio2, and refinary 2. And set it to harvest and grow colonists, for about a full day before you start building. That way, you have the colonists and resources nearby that you can feasible build a colony without wasting all of your fuel, which you'll need all of to raise cash to buy defenses from the starbase. And all of that completely neglects the land mines that a new player can run into like doming their planet horrifically (which always happens), or trying to build the planet types with no shot of being a good colony (especially for them). That's all knowledge you need to have, to start the entry level task of building a colony. There's no way a new player is going to put up with all of that just to get to the point where they'll give the game a chance! The latest perma is about 6 weeks old, and it has had several stretches of 2-3 days, where you would find 20-25 people online in the evenings. Which is great, but even those days, at a minimum 80% of the people online have been playing for years, or had new accounts because they played years ago. The number of new players starting up from scratch is almost negligible.

And that's just on building. You're also absolutely correct about how important it is now to just acquire resources. My experience lately has been that I've built, planned, and prepared for war and just to win most of the conflicts before they even start. It's been dogging me, for the past 3 months since I started playing permas again. I couldn't put my finger on it, but that's exactly it. When someone with the understanding of the game navigate all of the pitfalls finally shows up, they have such an advantage there's basically nothing to do about it.

Toonces, if you read this, please consider it carefully. This isn't a bitter rant or nostalgia, the issues Khayman layed out are structurally serious.

[Khayman]

You're experience with building tells me you went about things inefficiently, but that isn't the point. There's no tutorial, it isn't intuitive, and if you don't know what to do already you spend weeks to make colonies that are functionally horrible (if you're lucky enough that it doesn't get invaded). There's no way to expect a new player to figure it out from scratch, but at the same time they have to figure it out on their own. That's the crazy thing, if you take to mentoring a newb, teach them, and advise them. If you share the tricks you've learned over the years (and there's so many), you overload them. It becomes such a clusterfuck that they quit anyway.

Ultimately this doesn't surprise me. I was never much of a builder. Of course, back in the day, it didn't really matter. You brought the resources in, paid to rush, and were good to go. You didn't have to worry about resource consumption, and harvesting was pretty much only for Mountainous colonies because of the Atom Smasher. Each planet had it's bonuses (Deserts were the best at harvesting Spice, for example) but ultimately one Mountainous did the job just fine.

I came back remembering almost nothing about the various planet types. Mountainous was my goal because of the resource exchanging, with an Earth-like as a secondary goal because they were always easy to stabilize and made great colonist-farms.

But ultimately building turned out to be futile. I ran out of fuel and cash before I could do anything worthwhile. My U.N protection ran out before I could get the solar cannon up and I ended up losing the colony to some random guy who flooded it with cannons and mines. Game over. That was on Taurean. I ended up moving to The Permaverse, joining the top corp, and helping them in their war. Thought it'd be quite a bit more fun, but it ended up with me ramming myself into mines for a few hours until I ran out of cash and fuel.

Logged back on today. Spiced. Had about 600 fuel. Burned that up looking for colonies to invade. Ended up running out of fuel before I could find a planet that actually had a dome on it, so I logged off.

[BarbaraWalters]

I'd have to agree with pretty well everything in this thread by Luna/Duece/Khay.

There's not much else for me to say, other than "empires" (lets just say 50+ colonies owned personally) are very hard to manage. Back in the 5k pop days things were much more simplistic to maintain. You didn't have to go around and smash resources on your mountains to keep them alive, and also pollution is very hard to keep ontop of simply beause every colony produces a different level, some 3%, some 7%, some 14%.

I personally would LOVE to see these key things put into place.

- 5% pollution cap for every colony (maybe abolish environment or weaken it's effect to balance)
- no uranium/equip consumption for weapon production
- deserts/gh's/volcs need a little bit of tweaking (duece would be the person to talk to about this)
- double weapon factory production
- increase cargo holds

[inevamis]

-I actually dont mind cmines.. actually I like them. They make invading a little more dangerous and doing "mine tricks" adds a good element to team invading.

-I love the sound of low pollution and easy building.. but I have to play devil's advocate here a little bit. The flip side is, like classic server if you remember it... you will get these 3-4 million per person empires with this. After not too long every planet will be colonized and new players who join the game will not even have a planet they can build. They will basically have to start invading.. with no resources... which is even harder then starting to build with no resources. The people who will really benefit from this in the end will still be vets.. with huge empires. What would be a solution to this?

There has to be some sort of limiter on empires.. and unfortunately this is not going to be wars. Vets usually become friends and don't invade eachother, so what happens? All the newb corps get invaded. Even when there is the odd vet war, somebody wins then they go on to own half the server. This has always been the dilemma with permas. At this point Toonces has tried to make building and owning empires harder so not all the planets get used up.. and then he's tried to making invading harder to compensate. Invading actually has gotten harder... before you could solo invade cols no problem... now you often need at least 1 partner to invade effeciently. Unfortunately, it's a vicious circle because this has made invading more tedious and boring and newbs will have a harder time invading... the prob goes on...

I have to admit I can't really think of a solution except maybe larger servers... but then the player base it spread out too thin and that has been tried before. And even with larger servers players will never stop trying to grow thier empires.. especially if there's low pollution. I'm not sure how to get permas to work..

[inevamis]

What if corps with less than 5 cols (or something proportionate to the number of ppl in corp) can't be invaded? Hmm... that would be a solution to newbs getting wiped. However, building would need to stay difficult as it is.. and pollution high to keep all the planets from getting colonized and leaving no planets to build.

Perhaps new systems need to be periodically added too or sometin.

This would be good because it would allow corps to always be able to have enuff resources to stand up for themselves to a certain degree. It would also be good for people who want to play casually. In a sense... startport will be pax like for you (except for space fighting) until you decide you want to grow past the allowed number of safe cols.

This could in turn force vets to fight i tout a little more since they can only invade corps which are a certain size. The newb corps may try to grow to more than 5 cols or whatever it is but they will likely keep getting knocked back down to the 5 cols until they become better. This means the vets or more experienced players will only have eachoher to prey on...

[duece]

-I love the sound of low pollution and easy building.. but I have to play devil's advocate here a little bit. The flip side is, like classic server if you remember it... you will get these 3-4 million per person empires with this. After not too long every planet will be colonized and new players who join the game will not even have a planet they can build. They will basically have to start invading.. with no resources... which is even harder then starting to build with no resources. The people who will really benefit from this in the end will still be vets.. with huge empires. What would be a solution to this?

I've thought about that too, but I think it's the lesser of two evils. It takes a long time for those servers to reach that point, as opposed to what we have now where there's no point of the server for newbs to make a successful entry.

I don't even think colonies need that much of a boost, I think the process of getting them started needs to be somehow simplified. Things like taking out the mandatory 5% tax in UN protection, making buildings and research complete faster, making colonists easier to attain from ports (perma only). But really this game needs a tutorial, new players have to be guided through the process of making cash, and the start up of colonies.

The first server I ever played as a newb was Milky Way hours after a bang ended (I had no idea what was going on), and I still managed to find a volcanic with bio2 and refinary and got it built up completely before the server rebanged. When it was that simple, a guide doesn't seem neccessary. But a newb sees their colony is eating 150 of every resource an hour, their first instinct is to try to haul it in. Only a small minority reach out and ask for advice, the ones who don't figure that problem out are sure to quit. Or if they do realize they need to harvest, they try to harvest everything, and the colony grows so big it begins to revolt and pollute out of control. They get so tangled up dealing with issues like that, they don't have a chance to get solar/military up and haul in millions of credits of defenses.

Khayman, I don't know if you've realized this. Different servers have different building difficulties, most are 'expert', Taurean was 'normal', and there's also 'easy'. Intergalactic's Homeworld is a 2 1/2 month bang with 'easy' settings, where population is capped at 10,000 and pollution is a lot lower. If you're still willing to play, I'd be interested in your opinion about building on those servers. Its settings are meant to partially resemble old-style building.

[Khayman]

-I love the sound of low pollution and easy building.. but I have to play devil's advocate here a little bit. The flip side is, like classic server if you remember it... you will get these 3-4 million per person empires with this. After not too long every planet will be colonized and new players who join the game will not even have a planet they can build. They will basically have to start invading.. with no resources... which is even harder then starting to build with no resources. The people who will really benefit from this in the end will still be vets.. with huge empires. What would be a solution to this?

Ultimately the premise of invading is extremely simply. You have to get to the dome with full energy. You do this by clearing out as many lasers as you need to in order to get to the dome. If you have SCs or Energy Dynamos, it's made considerably easier. You can get hit by more lasers and still have full energy than someone who has no SCs/EDs.

It costs less than 1mil to get a Battleship with Surface Missiles and full shields, with credits leftover to reshield for hours. Considering each pirate NPC flying a Seth drops anywhere from 100-200k credits, it really doesn't take long. If you get unlucky and that Seth has a grav beam, you're screwed. But the majority of the time they have an easy to dodge weapon, or one that does low damage, and they're therefore easy to kill.

The more you invade, the better you get. But any new player should be able to invade well enough to take a colony, if they're determined to do it. Especially now that most of the skill has been removed from the equation and replaced with extra cost, in the form of reshielding due to compound mines. I took my first 5k colony two days after I came back, with a Battleship. I came back less than a week ago, and started over completely fresh. I had nothing at all. I also haven't played in nearly four years, and the game is completely different from when I started. There were 1 shot solars the last time I played. Now you get 10 shots, tightly confined. Takes a bit of learning, but it's easily doable.

I'd much rather see full servers than empty ones. Permaverse and Taurean are pretty empty. Without the right scanners you can't tell what planet is colonized and which aren't. It took me thousands of fuel to find planets to invade, simply because damn near every planet I landed on was either not colonized or fully defended with no dome. The game is a lot more fun when there's BBQ to actually do. When you can go system to system invading, rather than blowing hundreds of fuel just looking for planets that actually have a dome on them. You and I may be able to afford the right scanners (and we actually know which scanner is the right one) but new players won't have that luxury.

[Luna]

Not sure if this would just turn into a big exploit, but new accounts (or those less than a year old) could be issued much higher starting credits and better ships. The increase could be raised weekly/monthly ect... the longer the perm has been in place. Example you start with 3 million credits or more, enough to at least defend partly, and be able to buy the resources to build. If you started 6 months later, that amount might be 10 million credits.

I don't know why we still have the starting cruiser. It's useless. At the bare minimum people should start with a flower, or a merchant cruiser that is equipped with sufficient holds/cargo to keep them from being a floating target. Add the fact they can't get more than a handful of colonists in ports and they're doomed. The base having fluctuating prices for defenses makes it even harder for new players to afford to defend with lasers. They can't afford to pay 100k per laser, but established players can.

[duece]

Khayman, I wanted to address some of the specific problems you had:

Resource hauling time is actually greatly reduced if you use the shortcuts. The 'drop off, exit' buttons on the lower right part of the screen all map out to f1, f2, ... keys in order. If you have all of the resources in system, you could fill a colony with all of its building requirements in under 30 minutes.

Building time isn't that bad once you fill the dome with colonists, it's actually a matter of critical importance to secure a 'people farm' first, same as in the old days. The difference is you usually don't build this col, get an ocean to bio2, ref2 (radio/broadcast/bio3 are luxuries that help) and just leave it on 100% socialism harvesting. It will take more than a day if you keep it in UN, but once it stocks up your life becomes a lot easier.

Making cash isn't difficult on old permas, the ship prices at starbases go down, and resource prices at ports go up. Trading is more profitable than you're suggesting. A two-way trade route of the top 4 resources at 100%, will get you more than 100k per hop, and a few mil for 500 fuel. It's common now to raise enough cash trading to rush the bio2 and refinary of your first col.

I was in favor of compound mines when they first came out and grew to dislike them. But they're not as bad as you make them out to be. Cannons cost you nukes, and cmines cost you shields, the latter is usually easier for an invader. Then are are some fun things you can do around cmines like 'mine tricking'. Basically when a cmine is hit, there's about a second before it can be tripped again, so one invader can lead through them and a second can follow before they reset. It makes for some fun caps.

Most of the problems you ran into had solutions, but I think your experience illustrates how hard it is for newbies. And when I say hard, I don't mean how difficult it is to be successful in game, I mean how difficult it is just to get to the gameplay that's fun. The experience of building a colony and then using your colony to help build more even faster is the mass appeal of games like starport. The lead up that gets players there should be reduced.

[Khayman]

Khayman, I wanted to address some of the specific problems you had:

Resource hauling time is actually greatly reduced if you use the shortcuts. The 'drop off, exit' buttons on the lower right part of the screen all map out to f1, f2, ... keys in order. If you have all of the resources in system, you could fill a colony with all of its building requirements in under 30 minutes.

Building time isn't that bad once you fill the dome with colonists, it's actually a matter of critical importance to secure a 'people farm' first, same as in the old days. The difference is you usually don't build this col, get an ocean to bio2, ref2 (radio/broadcast/bio3 are luxuries that help) and just leave it on 100% socialism harvesting. It will take more than a day if you keep it in UN, but once it stocks up your life becomes a lot easier.

Making cash isn't difficult on old permas, the ship prices at starbases go down, and resource prices at ports go up. Trading is more profitable than you're suggesting. A two-way trade route of the top 4 resources at 100%, will get you more than 100k per hop, and a few mil for 500 fuel. It's common now to raise enough cash trading to rush the bio2 and refinary of your first col.

I was in favor of compound mines when they first came out and grew to dislike them. But they're not as bad as you make them out to be. Cannons cost you nukes, and cmines cost you shields, the latter is usually easier for an invader. Then are are some fun things you can do around cmines like 'mine tricking'. Basically when a cmine is hit, there's about a second before it can be tripped again, so one invader can lead through them and a second can follow before they reset. It makes for some fun caps.

Most of the problems you ran into had solutions, but I think your experience illustrates how hard it is for newbies. And when I say hard, I don't mean how difficult it is to be successful in game, I mean how difficult it is just to get to the gameplay that's fun. The experience of building a colony and then using your colony to help build more even faster is the mass appeal of games like starport. The lead up that gets players there should be reduced.

Everything you say here is completely ignoring my points. Not to mention it seems to be duece v everyone else. Certain things are agreed upon pretty universally by the current players. Then there's you defending each one as if there's no problem with them the way that they are.

I've played for years. I know the game. I'm a bit rusty because I haven't played in a while, but I knew pretty much everything, and I got back into the swing of things quickly.

New players won't be in my situation. This game is very unfriendly to new players. New players don't know that they need to build one particular planet type first, and then this certain planet type second, in order to be successful. And yes, I know the shortcuts. That doesn't make travelling system to system, mapping out the ports so you know where you can get each resource, and hauling the resources with limited cargo space any faster.

Trading is profitable, yes. However it's also a massive time waste and fuel sink. When you compare how much you're making for the amount of time and fuel put in, plus the cost of mapping the ports to see what can be traded and where, and on top of all that the time spent just figuring out the resources and trading system... it's a pretty big hassle and the alternative is better. Pirates aren't rare, unless their AI screws up and you get a pirate hub system with 15+ in one place. Doesn't happen often, they're usually quite easy to find. Since each ones drops anywhere from 50-200k, it's quick and easy money while teaching worthwhile skills. NPCs can't fight like humans, but they can teach you to dodge negs fairly well.

You're sitting here giving the view of a vet and how that person would play. You're attempting to negate every one of my arguments by using vet logic from a vet's point of view. I'm discussing the game from a new player's point of view, so the things you're saying just don't match up. They don't work. A new player isn't going to know what you know, and the vast majority of the time they aren't going to get someone to hold their hands and walk them through the game.

Compound mines are a disaster, and they really are as bad as I make them out to be. If there's a few it's not an issue. However, in my experience at least, the majority of the planets that I've invaded on Permaverse and Taurean were mine-heavy. Ramming yourself into mines is not fun, and there's no skill involved. "Mine tricking" is just using common sense. The first time you run into a compound mine, you notice that it has a short delay before the second detonation. The whole point of invading is to gain a new colony and to enjoy doing it. I used to have a lot of fun invading, and there was quite a bit of skill involved. Now a lot of that has been replaced by basic readiness checks. Do you have enough SCs/EDs to withstand the solar and cap the dome? Do you have enough cash to reshield to get rid of mines? If so congratulations, colony's your's. If not, what was your problem? Ran out of cash..get more. Energy regen isn't fast enough to bypass the solar? Buy more SCs/EDs. You've accepted them as just another part of the game. I disagree. I remember how the game was the last time that I played, and it was significantly different. Significantly more enjoyable. The game is extremely tedious now and compound mines are part of the problem. If other parts of the game weren't as bad, mines could be overlooked. But when there's other problems on top of this, they just make an already unenjoyable game even worse.

With all that said, this thread is quickly devolving into a useless argument about ideas. You seem to be stuck on what I wrote about building and you continually try to tell me how I'm doing it wrong. But what you don't realize, or at least hadn't up until this post, is that I'm writing that from the perspective of a new player (As I said above). They don't know that they have to build an Oceanic first, or that they need a people farm before they can get a colony going. And you say there's a solution to every problem I faced... Well of course there is. There's also a solution to every problem that Luna, Altair, and I.G pointed out. It's irrelevant. The game needs a change, and that's the point of this thread. To summarize the changes that the players would like to see, and have a discussion about those changes. Lower pollution to help with building weapons? Nonsense. Just pay to clean it, then you can have military at 100%. Problem solved. More cargo space? Nonsense. Buy a corp flagship, it's got 200 and tons of holds. Now you have cargo space AND can carry lots of cannons. Two birds with one stone. Problem solved. Less resources per building? I love you man! please. Harvesting 100% and barge the rest in. Problem solved. Raise the amount of taxes brought in per %? HA! 100% construction, Entertainment, tax the colony to death. Money flows in, problem solved. Now of course I'm not being serious, but I think my point is made. You can sit here and defend certain parts of the game, or you can open your eyes and realize that a few minor changes could change the game entirely and bring quite a bit more fun into the mix.

After all, a few small changes caused a big shift to begin with. Weapon factory resource consumption combined with colony resource consumption and lower taxes. Can't keep a colony steady easily, can't build weapons without sacrificing resources or spiking pollution, and can't clean pollution because of relatively low taxes. Makes it hard to build, hard to manage an empire and harder still to grow one. It's also why mines are so frequently used. They're widely available, cheap, and deter people from invading colonies that aren't truly worthwhile.

[duece]

You're sitting here giving the view of a vet and how that person would play. You're attempting to negate every one of my arguments by using vet logic from a vet's point of view. I'm discussing the game from a new player's point of view, so the things you're saying just don't match up. They don't work. A new player isn't going to know what you know, and the vast majority of the time they aren't going to get someone to hold their hands and walk them through the game.

I didn't mean it that way. I really didn't mean my post as a defense for all of those issues, my point was that there is an end game where the tedious things you mentioned aren't as bad, and it should be made a point to design the game to help people cut through those issues sooner.

I also think there are problems with invasion, but you're scapegoating cmines. Ramming out dozens of cmines isn't fun, but neither is nuking out a nuke eater. A combination of the new layouts (not even considering the random ones), 10 shot solars, difficulty of producing nukes, and cmines (yes they're a part of it), have steered people into defending their colonies in ways that are boring to invade. People don't defend their colonies as rings anymore, so most of the fun 'slide in, nuke your way out' type invasions are a thing of the past.

[inevamis]

Honestly, as a vet it is pretty much impossible to have a new players perspective anymore. I can't even imagine how hard the game must be. I remember when I first started playing I could hardly fly around a colony without bumping off every wall. Now you have to invade 10 shot solars with lazors and cmines. Then knowing how to actually build and defend a proper col? But after playing for 5+ years like us it's impossible to remember what it;s like having no knowledge of the game.

New players are pretty much vet fodder the moment they log in and have 0 chance of net getting wiped unless a vet reaches out to you.. but usually they are reaching out to take your colony lol. I once had an idea about having different servers for different levels of players based on their achievement points... may still be a good idea.

This game needs to be simplified though and made much more straight forward. Building and defending a colony needs to be easier and more simple. You actually need like formulas to stabilize oceans.. retarded. How is a new player supposed to know how to control pollution so it doesn't take every last dollar they have?

Duece I miss invading rings lol.. so fun. Though, I have no idea why people ever built them... I can't think of one good reason.. but I wish people would lol. Ohh.. actually maybe it's because they used to ward off vultures when vultures were actually useful. Remember when a superwide was considered a good colony? I dunno I'd just nuke eater that layout now. Though, as I said, nuke eaters used to be susceptable to vultures.

Another problem may be that vets outnumber new players like 8 to 1. So a new player is like a minnow entering a tank full of pirannas lol. If there were 8 new players to 1 vet than they'd at least have numbers.

Honestly a good tarting point would be just to revert the game to how it was 5 years ago XD. Was much simpler. Sometimes, less is more. Honestly the game is still good... but there were some things that were just so special that have been lost. Like vulturing and nuke dodging. Man there was nothing like a good space fight back in the day.

[inevamis]

I think the clear message though is that building needs to be easier.

BTW I should have said this from the get go... Altair's suggestions are right on the mark.... let the nukes and lazors flooooowwww.

[Luna]

There's been a patch today, that goes in the right direction. Volcanics have been changed a bit, and all colony WF have gotten an increase in equip/uran harvest production.

Toonces can you clarify how much increase they got?

[SiN]

Building vs Invading will always be an intense topic as there is no real way to balance them. When you make building "easier" you upset invaders and when you make invading "easier" builders always cry.

The root problem isn't so much the high skill cap/knowledge cap. It's part of the reason why many of the hardcore players initially got into the game. The problem is that building is tedious and almost every element introduced to balance the game hasn't made building less tedious just increased the time and cost of invading. Over the years as the refinery got easier to manage making colonies easier to manage for experienced players and solar's got bumped in power, spread, and changes in speed invading has become a less effective way of obtaining an empire and fighting has become almost pointless with the introduction of mods. An experienced player can still build faster and more cheaply than an invader and on colonies that make invaders less likely to waste their time. Fighting over any territory past the early stages of a perma is a total waste.

I feel like in the recent attempts to appease builders the game has only become more complex in that stage for new players without becoming less tedious. For a new player it takes forever to build a terrible col because they have no knowledge of the best layouts and domeplacements to make invaders just go what a waste of time and resources can be a pain to obtain for them.

Being an invader I can only say any changes to bring a lot of the old invaders back would just irritate new players more and I don't know what to do about that. The highly skilled older class of invaders loved the thrill of sliding cols to precision nuke, domeslides, mine tricks, etc... It was a fine art that may be called "easy" now by everyone but the challenge was how far you could push yourself. Yet the settings that allowed us to do such invades really made building a colony pointless because no colony was safe and even nuke eaters as late in the game as 07 weren't as time consuming and expensive as invading now. Once a new player can get past the knowledge cap required to become a moderately decent builder now, invading becomes a waste of time and he keeps most of his cols.

Another problem new players face is fuel consumption. Veteran players have become accustomed to the 5k fuel and how to manage it between building, invading, exploring, etc... New players do not have this luxury. When you could spice infinitely or even when spicing was capped high, it became problematic because vets had tons of fuel to manage if they took a breather for a few days. New players rarely get to that point.

Is there any way to fix this? No, the game itself doesn't really allow for both sides to be happy. If either becomes "easier" by todays standards the time required to do anything goes up and the playerbase shrinks. The changes I would suggest would be:
1) lower build times and resource costs or higher availabilty of resources on servers and lower resource costs.

2) a considerable reduction of all nuke eater layouts

3) increased energy reduction upon being hit by laser cannons or solar cannons

4) slider on solar cannons that slides between fire rate and damage/energy reduction with a floor set for rate based on military

5) Increase hold on all ships

6) increase viability of all ships for invading

7) allow us to spice over 5k fuel up to say 7.5k or increase automatic gain of fuel up to a 7.5k cap (i know tokens are probably largely spent on fuel but it would help everyone)

decrease the availablity of 10//120 cols while increasing the viability of everything weaker than that


Some of my 2 cents in as disorganized a fashion as possible.

[Toonces]

What if the difficulty level on Taurean Sector were lowered from Medium to Easy?

This would have the following effects:
- higher colonist reproduction rates in colonies
- more positive morale rates in colonies
- slower pollution accumulation rates in colonies
- max population for biodome level 3 is 10k colonists rather than 25k colonists

[duece]

Speaking for myself, I would be upset if Taurean were changed to a 10k dome server. Maybe an 'easier' setting that retains the 25k dome would be nice, but that isn't my preference.

This thread had so many differing opinions and suggestions it's hard to pick out a 'main' part, but some things came up over and over:
- Increase cargo holds, 100-200 extra holds for stock-mod servers would be nice.
- Boost weapons production, the recent patch helped this, although most in this thread were wanting zero resources to make weapons.
- Cut resource requirements or building time for colonies.
(and nobody said this but I think it should)
- Remove the 5% UN tax thing, to cut out some of the work from the process of growing and finding colonists when you start building. Alternatively you could make it easier to get colonists from ports.

The things that came up for invading:
- There should be fewer 'nuke(and shield) eater' colony defenses (by extension more rings).
- 10 shot max military colonies shouldn't be too frequent (the big problem with easy settings).
- More colonies should be built.

I can't speak for the people in this thread, but more of the building suggestions were targeted at reducing the time and labor to build a colony than to make it 'easy' setting. Also easy mode goes against the invader wishes of faster paced, less grinding style invasion. One thing both groups want is for there to be more colonies built.

Addressing the invasion dynamic is probably too complicated a problem to tackle with a few suggestions, but increasing the abundance of nukes is the only way to discourage nuke eaters (generic defenses that force an invader to spend a minimum amount of nukes). Indirectly that increases the amount of colonies defended as rings which make for the high action, sliding-type invasions.

Duece I miss invading rings lol.. so fun. Though, I have no idea why people ever built them... I can't think of one good reason.. but I wish people would lol. Ohh.. actually maybe it's because they used to ward off vultures when vultures were actually useful. Remember when a superwide was considered a good colony? I dunno I'd just nuke eater that layout now. Though, as I said, nuke eaters used to be susceptable to vultures.

Sorry I overlooked this before man. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that because, ...well, I'm duece. I think rings were common partly because there was such an abundance of nukes. Nuke eaters are much easier to invade once you have the resources for it, when it was easy to get nukes it made cols like that suck. Also, in the 1 shot solar days, you had to try to leverage your laser cannons more, ring types cost fewer nukes/credits to take, but also have a much better shot at causing a death, which back in the day made them more preferable. The recent patch helped boost nuke production, which should help with the nuke eater thing. It would probably take a bigger patch to bolster ring defenses, but the patch that shrunk landing zones will at least help it on random layout servers.

[inevamis]

If you owned a ring near sol you'd get tons of people dying in your news. Actually there were a ton of newbs who couldn't invade rings. Then, if you did lose it you could get it back easily. I still never would've built one though. Though pure nuke eaters were weak cols and someone could vulture with a dser. Always wanted some landing defenses to keep vultures away.

[Luna]

I definately agree.

*****Shorten building time, but keep UN 5 days for new players. EVERYONE wants less tedious building!

***Increase stock mod holds to 250-300 (non Mod servers only)

*Remove UN tax while building or make it an option

*Increase colonist reproduction from ports

***** Increase weapons/defense production dramatically Colonies will be defended, people can fight, invade and take back colonies. This element is crucial for builders and invaders. Keep 25k max colonies.

**Lower pollution or make it where you can tax and still be stable.
1. Example: More tax money allows people to build, defend, fight, reship, and clean if they want. Lack of cash kills cols, keeps people from Building, invading or defending properly.

**Give IGP and desert planets a boost of some type. IGP isn't that "special", and deserts are rarely built. Same with greehouse types. Doesn't have to be solar related, but give people a reason to want to build them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Very, very, very Low on the somday list, but Commodities Market needs a boost. The other day I took 160 oil to port and sold it for about 100k. I have a col with 48,000 oil in refinery and Commodities Market. I sold 29,000 oil through the Commodities Market and only made 2 million! This research is useless currently.

*Just a random idea for all servers. Make Universal Announcements 4/1.00 (250 tokens each) instead of 350 so they divide equally.

***Give us more things to buy with tokens.

[inevamis]

Like everything Luna said. Pehaps also make population grow easier. I think that's anothe rproblem.. newbs don't get their cols populated fast enuff and then their solars aren't strong enough. Just making ports give more pop doesn't help us pirates! Faster pop would in turn help with faster building. I think the thing we are going for is a fully defended, populated and built col should not be hard or to do.

The fact that it still doesn't come out of UN for 5 days balances the fact that it is easier to build (won't get exp form it until comes out of UN). However, the huge bonus is it doesn't come out of UN as complete crap. This will actually help save planets on a server because you won't have 50% of them with dead domes. So this helps with the problem of no available planets for building.

I thought I'd never say this... but negs for sale from ports may need to increase a little bit to compensate? I know weapons will be building faster but somepeople sell all their wf's.

I think oceans also need to be balanced. I can't count how many abondoned very large pop oceans I've found. There populations gets out of control and then their pollution gets out of hand. Little do newbs know.. you have to set their anaroebe production to like -40 or somthing like that. Something that really makes no sense and they will never figure out.

[inevamis]

The only problem I foresee is crazy builders could start building like 10-15 cols at a time (which would cause builders to be overpowered and also may make permas grow too fast). I thought about this and I think a good solution could be that you can only have a certain number of UN cols at once. Say like 3-5.. depending on how easy building is. 5 would allow you to start 1 new col a day. This will then also force some players like Luna to do some stuff other then building too!

[duece]

I think oceans also need to be balanced. I can't count how many abondoned very large pop oceans I've found. There populations gets out of control and then their pollution gets out of hand. Little do newbs know.. you have to set their anaroebe production to like -40 or somthing like that. Something that really makes no sense and they will never figure out.

There are people who've played for over 4 years without understanding how that works, and basically every newb's ocean col is an over-grown pollution whore that doesn't make any profit. Really, the only thing that is simpler about 10k domes is you don't have to get a calculator out to figure out exactly how much of a resource you should be losing. I think toonces was resistant to this before, but if partial consumption was just directly a partial bonus, so that harvesting half of the anaerobe requirements directly gave half the repro boost, it would help people deal with a lot of these problems.

[inevamis]

The only problem I foresee is crazy builders could start building like 10-15 cols at a time (which would cause builders to be overpowered and also may make permas grow too fast). I thought about this and I think a good solution could be that you can only have a certain number of UN cols at once. Say like 3-5.. depending on how easy building is. 5 would allow you to start 1 new col a day. This will then also force some players like Luna to do some stuff other then building too!

This goes for you too Duece! Builder boy What you think about this?

[duece]

I would just cancel UN, it isn't a big deal when ppl don't hug with you. I do that a lot anyway just to grow colonists quicker, but that isn't an option for new players or smaller corps.

Acquiring colonists is a starting up challenge, once you get going it stops being a big deal. So I think a lot of these proposed changes would affect me less than most. I make my colonies harvest as much as they can before I build them and I have enough cash to rush buildings when I need. Things like adding extra cargo holds, or cutting the time to finish buildings might make me build like 20% faster, but might help someone like Luna build twice as fast.

Also it will take time for the effect of the weapons factory patch to set in so we won't know right away if it did enough for nuke-making, but I agree it's a problem that defenders can just sell their weapons factories and it will slow invaders down so much. Maybe just cutting the cash and resources to rush a factory would help that? Even if you capture a few empty factories, you could set them to making nukes and forget about them for a few days.

[inevamis]

Guess you can cancel UN at your own risk if you want. If were going with this model may need to take that option out. How many cols do you build at once though? don't you think if pop was growing easier, resources are easier, wepaons production is easier.. you could build twice as many cols at once? Another option would be to make building take some fuel.. but that option worries me a little if it takes away from people ability to then do non-building activity like invading.

But anyways I guess we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves, getting Luna's suggestions implemented is step 1.

[duece]

Well, when I say make growing colonists easier, I don't mean boost reproduction rates. Removing the 5% tax makes it easier to grow them under UN protection, boosting colonists in ports makes it easier to find, and boosting cargo makes it easier to stock consumables if you need to grow them.

None of that stuff really helps me, because the way I build, I dome 30-40 colonies at once and manage them all building themselves (harvesting as much as they can for themselves). Most of the time my cols finish their buildings or needs something done way sooner than I can get to them anyway, so making them grow in faster does nothing for me.

Out of Luna's ideas, the only one that really makes a difference to me is the cargo boost, but that's fine because I don't need any additional help. It won't double my building rate or anything like that.

[WeGotDeathStar]

I've said this before in game and it is now obvious the ramifications of "Random Layouts'

How are new players going to learn whats good to build and whats not when there is no baseline to go off of? Older players like this "Random Layout" change because everything is now nuke eaters thus increasing invading time drastically. If a building only server was desired then keep the "Random Layouts" for only older players, new players always had the deck stacked against their success now this is guaranteed by having layouts that nobody has any clue whats good and whats trash. New players only get hard built colonies taken even faster and they quit even sooner.

10k,25k, 50k colonies won't matter....the problem is the colony layouts. Patch the new server with 20% random layouts and the rest traditional layouts. Nothing else done will fix anything, nobody will bother to build or invade on the new server, the only winners are the players that build nuke eater empires and even they will get bored in a month or two. We already had a builder only server, it was called "Frontier Wars" where builders could hide out in a Fog of War style that nobody wanted to take the time to explore and invade. The new server will become the same problem sooner then later.


Fix it while you can or just bang a new server in a week or two. Honestly no offense to most of the people that have posted on this topic but from what I have seen is a majority of builders, if there are no invaders then what is the point to making any changes at all.