2018-09-27 Ship Repair, University Morale, Delete Overlap, Craters

[Haxus]

Spacecraft Repair Quality
The inability to repair a spacecraft with lower Q components presents a frustrating roadblock. I had a note to rework this.

Spacecraft can now be repaired using any Q of components.

• A system's module Q is reduced to the lowest Q component that is installed into it.
  
• The UI to request repairs has a control to set the minimum Q components desired.
  
• The UI to request repairs shows the relevant module and its Q next to each system.
  
• When repairing a system by hand, the best Q parts are pulled from the hold first. If no parts are found there, the best Q parts are pulled from your gear.
  
• Repair mission order now has options for choosing the minimum quality of parts the officer should use when carrying out the order.
  • System Module Quality repairs each system one by one, using the current module Q of that system as the min Q for parts. This is the default.
    
  • Spacecraft Manufacture Quality repairs all damage using the manufacture quality of the ship as the min Q.
    
  • Specified Minimum Quality uses a min Q set in the mission order.
    
• This change eliminates an exploit where high Q components are removed from a system and replace using low Q component, ad infinitum.
  

Officer Not Repairing
Officer does not get repairs from new style buildings.

Fixed a bug that prevented the officer from finding new style repair shops.

Orbit Best Planet
It was requested that the Orbit Best Planet order be restored. It was removed some time ago.

Orbit Best Planet order restored to mission orders UI.

Request Repairs Response
The reply when requesting repairs could be more informative, to explain why repairs cannot be performed.

The reply when requesting repairs will now include the following information.

• Parts that are not available at the minimum Q requested.
  
• Parts that are in short supply at the minimum Q requested.
  
• Parts that are not available at all.
  
• Parts that are available in sufficient quantities if minimum Q was lower.
  

University Morale Bug
Universities do not seem to give any morale.

Fixed a bug when tallying universities that were not conducting any research at all.

Delete Overlap
It is sometimes impossible to delete a building, road or crater that is overlapping another.

The bulldozer button on the construction window can now select through the possible choices under the cursor. This is done using the mouse wheel or left|right arrow keys.

Craters
Craters do not deform the terrain at building sites or roads. This allows underground buildings to be invulnerable to attack.

Craters now deform the terrain of buildings and roads.

• Craters destroy the pavement on the entire road segment. It becomes a dirt road.
  
• Road segments are not destroyed so building connections are not affected.
  
• Building structures can be left partially or totally floating in space, making them vulnerable to attack.
  
• New roads and buildings can be built in craters.
  
• A road reduced to dirt by bombing can be restored by paving it. The paved road will fix the crater deformation.
  

No Tool Refetch
When running a construction site, optional tools are not fetched again if the one wears out.

Fixed a bug that prevented the construction site UI from fetching when all required components were satisfied. It will now fetch if any component remains unsatisfied.

Empire 0 Cities Don't Export
Empire 0 cities do not export commodities to any empire affiliated cities.

Changed export policy of empire 0 to export to enemies, which is how empire 0 views all empires.

Officer Does Not Complete Travel Order
On two occasions so far, an officer has failed to mark a "Travel to Coordinates" order as complete, although the helm is satisfied with his position. In both cases, the coordinates were galactic.

I made a slight tweak to the commander AI that might fix the problem.

Avatar not in CoC can Run 0 Shop Jobs
It used to be impossible for avatars that weren't in chain of command of a city to run jobs that didn't have "Employ Citizen" checked. In new-style manufacturing lets anyone run a manufacturing line that has 0 workshops allocated.

Enabled/disabled controls on the Manufacture and Spacecraft Factory pages of the Building window, based on chain of command requirements.

Server Crash
There have been a number of server crashes in the past few days.

Thank you Mr. Mortius for leading me directly to this bug. It was caused by changing the minimum Q on a manufacturing process on a new style building.

Collision With Terrain
Collision with terrain is buggy. Sometimes I get killed suddenly when lying prone. Spacecraft crash very easily.

Nerfed collision with terrain until I can work on it.

[Deantwo]

Spacecraft Repair Quality

Since a spacecraft is manufactured using the average quality of all materials used, repairing your spacecraft will now make it worse because it will go from an average to the lowest quality.

This is not a complaint, just an observation.
It will now be better to make a new spacecraft, rather than repair an existing one.

Delete Overlap
It is sometimes impossible to delete a building, road or crater that is overlapping another.

The bulldozer button on the construction window can now select through the possible choices under the cursor. This is done using the mouse wheel or left|right arrow keys.

Definitely loving this feature!
Been missing this since biodomes and grading were added.

Collision With Terrain
Collision with terrain is buggy. Sometimes I get killed suddenly when lying prone. Spacecraft crash very easily.

Nerfed collision with terrain until I can work on it.

Going to assume that by "nerfed" you mean "disabled" or "removed". I do not think that means what you think it means.

Anyway, only issues I have had with fall damage has been when prone, other than that it actually felt good.
The only thing I think would help would be a "collision warning" system. If your vehicle/ship is flying too fast towards an atmosphere it could warn you on the HUD and tell you what a safe reentry speed is, same with flying too fast towards the surface.

[AnrDaemon]

I would actually make that quality change into complaint.
And propose a solution.

If a module is damaged by less than a certain %%, repairing it with any quality components would not change quality of the subsystem.

Otherwise, recalculate subsystem(s) quality based on average of current quality and quality of repair components, and subsequently recalculate the average quality of the ship.

[Deantwo]

I would actually make that quality change into complaint.
And propose a solution.

If a module is damaged by less than a certain %%, repairing it with any quality components would not change quality of the subsystem.

Otherwise, recalculate subsystem(s) quality based on average of current quality and quality of repair components, and subsequently recalculate the average quality of the ship.

That wouldn't fix the exploit Haxus was trying to fix with this change.
Manually repair with Q1 metal, then remove metal from ship again to get metal of the ship's quality.

The exploit was only with small amount of commodities though, and doesn't matter too much.

But in the end this whole exploit won't really matter if we change over to mostly using spacecraft components/parts for manufacturing and repair of spacecraft.

[AnrDaemon]

I suggested "construction modules" for spacecrafts years ago.
It's just a titanic disbalance to have construction require single items of all types but millions of one.
Production and supply chains just can't cover it.

[Mr. Mortius]

I'm not sure I see the point of making a repaired ship the quality of the worst item used either. I guess someone could sit there and remove parts from a ship that might have a slightly higher quality than whatever raw resource they're mining, but without actually going and developing a source of that material they aren't going to be able to do anything that'd have much of an impact on the game. Tanking the quality of a ship whenever it might repair at the wrong place will affect things far more.

Anr, would you mind explaining how construction modules would improve things for ships? Production and supply chains can keep up just fine, as I have a city with lines of factories producing the largest allowed ships. New cities are a huge help, if you aren't using those yet. Construction modules would presumably cost the same amount of raw materials as just building a ship too, all they would do is add another intermediate step, so I'm not sure how that'd change anything. They'd only increase the number of steps in the production chain, not simplify anything. I do know one benefit that someone mentioned would be to sell modules to an empire without the patents to create them so that they could build ships they normally couldn't, but given how simple it is to obtain patents and that the ship could just be sold directly, this doesn't seem like a big benefit either.

I can see requiring multiple modules to upgrade or change a system being required after a ship is already constructed, though. Currently, a ship can be built with a metal hull that requires millions of metal, then upgraded to an adamantine hull which only requires 50k adamantine. The best way I can see to handle this is to keep the manual upgrading option, but have it require a certain number of modules of that type be available in the ship's cargo hold. It'd then consume more than one module to upgrade a ship.

[AnrDaemon]

Construction modules would be a replacement for certain amount of metal.
So that the number of modules would be constant for a given ship design, regardless of module material.

[Haxus]

Another advantage of using modules for construction is that it enables a certain amount of the manufacturing to be done ahead of time, and production of modules can be distributed.

[Mr. Mortius]

Another advantage of using modules for construction is that it enables a certain amount of the manufacturing to be done ahead of time, and production of modules can be distributed.

This is sort of how I already see manufacturing, say, cryo heat sinks in a different system and then shipping them in, but I can see that this could act as an extension of that.

[Haxus]

It would mean that a system could not be upgraded in the field. Modules would be spare parts. The appropriate modules would be needed to repair your systems.

Repairs would be expressed in terms of modules, when purchased at a repair shop.

To upgrade a system, the same number of modules used to build that system would need to be installed. This would bring system build, repair, and upgrades full circle to working with modules in a sensible way.

I would also change the manufacturing processes for modules to take a lot less materials, perhaps about 100 of the key components.

Spacecraft manufacturing processes would no longer require the module patents, just the modules. Then you could build ships using modules acquired elsewhere, without having to know how they were made.

Ships might then be built in 1/100th of the time.