Nerf Building Quality Progression

[Deantwo]

These manufacturing processes, all patents, do not consume anything that determines the final Q of the patent. The resulting patent Q is determined by the Q of the university.

"Adamantite, Method for Mining"
"Bolite, Method for Mining"
"Eludium, Method for Mining"
"Lumenite, Method for Mining"
"Phlogiston, Method for Drilling"
"Polytaride, Method for Drilling"
"Radioactives, Method for Mining"
"Viathol, Method for Drilling"
"Vulcanite, Method for Mining"

The solution would be to make a requirement of their natural resource material. e.g. The Adamantite patent would have to consume a chunk of adamantite. That is not impractical, as each of the materials can be gathered by hand. The quality of the patent would then be equal to the quality of the material, since building Q is not a factor.

Forcing us to forage a few rock samples in order to research them makes a lot of sense.
Only issue is than liquid resources (Magmex and Myrathane) and gaseous resources (Cryozine and Ioplasma). I would however suggest changing them to having the environmental factors just be time reduction and then give us ways to collect samples.

A tool to forage gaseous resources from the atmosphere in person would be interesting. The liquid resources I don't have a good idea about how to forage, especially Magmex.
But we could also just use a spacecraft with a harvester bay to collect the samples.

Gas giant resources might be too hard to gather by hand. The gravity is typically too great for you to move on foot.

In my experience, swimming in a gas giant isn't affected by gravity. But maybe something changed with the fall damage addition?

EDIT: Foraging and swimming inside a gas giant works fine, no issue. Updated the wiki.

[Mr. Mortius]

Requiring some sort of mission to go harvest materials, either by hand or with a sample-collecting ship sounds like it'd be a fun way to research the patents for some of the raw resource harvesting processes. In some ways it makes me think of the Apollo program's moon rock samples.

As far as quality and ship building, allowing any size ship to be built with any quality of materials makes a lot of sense. The improvements from using high quality materials in construction would still drive empires to expand, but would reduce limitations on new empires some. The bonus curve from quality might need to be revised if this option is taken, since the benefit of increased size resulting directly from high quality will be removed by it.

[Ikkir Isth]

On QL stuff: In the end, this is more or less the crux of the game: not only empire progression, but actual player progression as well (since thats slated to be in sometime, nows when you need to think about it). Typically, IMO, you want the majority of actual progression to be dependent upon players themselves: acquiring the rare resources that AI cant, getting equipment far beyond the standards produced in factories (and making that equipment for others), and inventing things that bring their empire and the universe forward. Lets talk about what we have though, which is just the empire/cities stuff.

The core concept of an MMO works by some sort of grind + maintenance model. Right now in Hazeron, the grind is part passive (waiting for QL ups on buildings), active (building more cities for more officers), and explorative (finding those max QL resources), plus to a small extent creative (designing new ships). As for maintenance, the QL building part has no real maintenance: you grind (or someone else does) and then that QL building exists in universe forever. Explorative maintenance also stops, usually, unless you have to relocate (by war or by choice), as players dont continually have to seek out new max QL deposits (though you can lump in actual exploitation of those few instances of players having to run harvest barges here as well), Active city building slows down a bit, but it still requires continual maintenance, and creative maintenance is really just an advancement of its own grind, and probably the more fun part: designing ships because you want to, instead of because you have to (because you need a new QL size), and really, these creations are the most lasting part of actual player-based progression.

For the question: can a Q1 player build a Deathstar? I say, sure, why not. One needs to think about how a Deathstar is made, of course. Its way too big to build on planet, so you need to build in space, so first you need to build sufficient space construction ability. Right now, this is in the form of any size space station, and then you run the job normally from land in any size spacecraft factory taking a bit of an increased time to build as anything else, using a single worker, with the main cost to be acquiring/shipping in enough materials. What should a Deathstar take, though? Should you first need to build a massive construction station, bit by bit, in order to build ships of this size? Should you require much bigger factories? Should the station and/or factories require specialized modules for this construction, which also have to be built and added? Is there a research line you want to go thru to unlock building bigger ships, and, if so, is there a tech object maintenance cost to utilize this research, and can a Q1 city/empire use this object in lieu of the research? Should bigger ships have structure failure penalties that reduce hp/ability if you dont have high enough QL / dont use more advanced materials like magmium, vulcium, or whatever alloys or stuff that might come from players? Should you need an entire planets worth of population (or more, slaves?) working on a Deathstar to have it build in a reasonable amount of time? And what about the cost, for all those materials, for any and all workers, how can they afford this, and who all should have to pay? Does the empire get free work out of its citizens to build these military ships (private persons of course already have to pay)? Once they do get it built, what about maintenance costs - repairs and fuel and module replacement and sufficient crew and ammo and life support and .. etc.

In the end, thinking about progression is thinking about how the core game works; you want to make sure its engaging all the way thru, has player action and investment, encourages working together (it is an MMO after all), and it at least has to make some semblance of sense in the game setting. This is a very, very big topic; expect a lot of complications, and a lot of time to put everything together for the big picture.

[Haxus]

Only issue is than liquid resources (Magmex and Myrathane) and gaseous resources (Cryozine and Ioplasma). I would however suggest changing them to having the environmental factors just be time reduction and then give us ways to collect samples.

Those patent development processes don't consume the natural resource but they already do require it. In that case, I can get the Q from the natural resource because it is going to be there.

The list of patents that I posted did not require the natural resource. They were only set up to benefit from them with a time reduction.

[Haxus]

As a consequence of removing building Q, the Q of airport repair shops is no longer a factor when repairing or recovering spacecraft.

[Deantwo]

Only issue is than liquid resources (Magmex and Myrathane) and gaseous resources (Cryozine and Ioplasma). I would however suggest changing them to having the environmental factors just be time reduction and then give us ways to collect samples.

Those patent development processes don't consume the natural resource but they already do require it. In that case, I can get the Q from the natural resource because it is going to be there.

The list of patents that I posted did not require the natural resource. They were only set up to benefit from them with a time reduction.

I think I would rather have consistency with how to research the patents, have them cost the resources. Not to mention those foraging tools would be useful.
It always felt weird for me that those patents required the university/building to be on the harsh environment world in order to research it.

As a consequence of removing building Q, the Q of airport repair shops is no longer a factor when repairing or recovering spacecraft.

Won't miss that. Being told you can't recover your ship or buy repairs because of the building not being "old enough" or "forgot to bring tech", was always just annoying.
Especially when we could clearly still manually repair the ship.

[AnrDaemon]

What if the quality size progression was removed from spacecraft? What if somebody built a Q1 Death Star?

Then anybody would be able to kick it out of the sky with a knife and a jetpack.
Is there a problem?

Then a new player is closer to starting on an even footing with existing empires. They would still have to discover and gather materials and develop patents.

Yes.

These manufacturing processes, all patents, do not consume anything that determines the final Q of the patent. The resulting patent Q is determined by the Q of the university.

<list of harvesting patents>

The solution would be to make a requirement of their natural resource material. e.g. The Adamantite patent would have to consume a chunk of adamantite.

Why not just remove them? They are doing nothing.

[Deantwo]

These manufacturing processes, all patents, do not consume anything that determines the final Q of the patent. The resulting patent Q is determined by the Q of the university.

<list of harvesting patents>

The solution would be to make a requirement of their natural resource material. e.g. The Adamantite patent would have to consume a chunk of adamantite.

Why not just remove them? They are doing nothing.

They don't do nothing, but I will agree that they also aren't needed.
Patents are mostly fluff right now. Adding a small layer of discovery and research. Most notably they hide manufacturing processes that you haven't researched yet, so there is less clutter.

My biggest issue with patents is that their research processes are listed in all buildings. I would love to see patent research removed from normal buildings and instead require players to research at a university.
Secondly is how they are researched, I would love it if their manufacturing UI for patent research was different from normal manufacturing. Maybe a nice graphical technology tree showing prerequisites, and showing branches that will unlock new patents and branches that won't (kinda like Minecraft's achievement view).

Only reason that we can research patents at all buildings is because we can make buildings that we haven't researched the patents for. For example, maybe we should be unable to build a nuclear power plant before we have researched one of the patents used by it.
At worst the construction menu will seem a little empty when first starting out, and players will be forced to make a university early on. But I do think that it would actually be a good thing.

[AnrDaemon]

In the end, thinking about progression is thinking about how the core game works; you want to make sure its engaging all the way thru, has player action and investment, encourages working together (it is an MMO after all), and it at least has to make some semblance of sense in the game setting. This is a very, very big topic; expect a lot of complications, and a lot of time to put everything together for the big picture.

Many MMO's are built on presumption of a session game but brand themselves as an "open world game".
The core distinction is player's ability to join mid-session and achieve competitive performance in a reasonable time.
In an open world MMO (true open world) progression should be aimed at player education, rather than hindering the player for no explainable reason.

[Haxus]

Patents fill a valuable role in encapsulating technological knowledge in a concrete way, without having arbitrary technological differences like a TL1 rifle vs a TL10 rifle. If I develop the technology to make laser rifles, I can share that technology with others; the patent is the token of that knowledge. If someone does not develop laser rifle technology, then they cannot suddenly start mass producing laser rifles.

I disagree that a player should know that developing a patent for plastic today could lead to the discovery of warp drives down the road.