2020-01-21 Server Crash, Mesh Lighting, Name Species, Site Overlap

[Haxus]

I am working on exploits that must be fixed before restarting. Last time, exploits were used heavily to gain an early advantage. I would like to prevent that happening this time.

This is the last remaining topic on the list of things that must be done before resetting the database. Then I will look through the various threads on the forum for more. There will likely be something I’ve missed.

That is not to say everything is done. I don’t think it ever will be. It will just be done enough for the restart.

[martianant]

In the tile terrain days, a tile had 0-4 rocks. That determined the number of mining processes you could run. Likewise, the number of trees limited the number of logging processes. You could not put two buildings on the same tile.

Yes, and in the tile terrain days, the resource cost for buildings and cities was much, much, much lower so the limited yield was balanced. The issue is how unbalanced the cost of all new style designs are with this new raw resource extraction limit. By limiting cities so heavily, as others have noted it will push players to use more and more officers for harvesting ships/stations to come even close to gaining the hundreds of thousands - millions of resources to build ships and cities which has a greater strain on the servers over having the cities be more feasible for extraction by having a higher process per rock multiplier.

[Mr. Mortius]

I have to agree. With the combination of the limit on number of worlds per account and the severe reduction in available resource extraction jobs per world, costs of new style ships are too high. While I would actually prefer for the upper range of ships to be extremely difficult and expensive to make, the idea of trying to construct any high quality adamantine ship from a handful of mines on a gas giant core is really off-putting. The cost could easily be 10 million adamantine.

[jakbruce2012]

Nobody should be able to build a massive max size vessel like the 104, without some serious prep work. When you first start out, there is always a bigger fish, until you build that biggest fish. Even then there are always things to tweak with the ratios, usability, and looks, until you find "the best ship" for your use case.

I'm not expecting to build any capital ships the first week, maybe in the second week....

[Deantwo]

The more you guys talk about just over using harvesters, the more sure I feel that we do need a limit on harvesters too.
See: Re: Limiting Resource Harvesting to Number of Nodes

We were never meant to have unlimited number of mining jobs on just one location. That was a bug that was simply there for way longer than it should have been. And now everyone has grown too used to building massive buildings and ships from a very small settlement in no time.

If rocks of the type you want was highlighted in the world when placing a mine/well, it would be easier to find the optimal places for those mines/wells. But this might not be possible?

Mines and wells are not prevented from overlapping. Mines just can't overlap mines and wells can't overlap wells.

My only fear with this is the inconsistency. Not allowing any buildings at all to overlap is easy to understand by a new player, annoying as it might be, since we no longer have the elevation guide at the edge of building sites when placing them.

This is the last remaining topic on the list of things that must be done before resetting the database. Then I will look through the various threads on the forum for more. There will likely be something I’ve missed.

Yeah, got plenty of bug report threads that might have gone unseen for too long.
Most of the exploits I have reported there are about making bases that can't be destroyed. Both in regards to AI targeting and literally impossible to reach base structures that hide behind invulnerable civilian structures.
For example: (Bug report) Civilian Buildings Block Weapon's Fire

[Vectorus]

Allowing overlap is not necessarily the proper solution; it's just that, till now, it provided a workaround for a genuine problem.

As everyone is pointing out, the problem is that yields are so low.

Yes, high-end ships should require work to achieve. The big problem is that, right now, no amount of work can get them built in anything less than several months. The number of rocks per world is low enough that even with every single one being mined right now, you wouldn't be able to gather the resources for a big-ish (just big-ish, not titanic) ship in less than several weeks.

In the old days? Not a problem - that's an incentive to expand. Colonize more worlds, harvest more rocks. Except that now, there is also a hard limit on the number of planets you can own without decay, and it's not high enough to get a good extraction rate. There is a hard, absolute limit to how quickly you can extract raw materials, which no amount of work or dedication can exceed - and it's too low for the level the game is pitched at. It's not that it's hard to build big ships, it's that there is literally no way to get it done faster than a certain rate no matter how skilled or devoted you are, and that rate is frighteningly slow compared to the cost of a month's subscription.

So please, help us correct this as an urgent matter of balance. As I've said before, the best solutions are probably decreasing ship and building requirements by a factor of at least 100 for max-sized ships (perhaps even 150-200), with a curve so that small and mid ships have less of a cost reduction - or increasing the number of processes per rock by about 100. I tend to advocate the latter, because the ship build-times themselves (on the order of a month) are fine; it's just the gathering stage that's not well balanced.

Either of those fixes would keep your concrete link between rock generation and resource extraction intact, while alleviating the punishing scarcity of supply for established players with design goals bigger than about one third the design limit.

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(I refer to the problem as urgent; to be fair it's more urgent for after the reset, as the timescales we're talking about mean we probably won't even get anything built before then.

But afterwards, it will be important, as experienced players who understand how to leapfrog their production up through space-harvesters of increasing capacity will soon be able to outproduce newbies and stockpile resources to such a ridiculous degree that the newbies will never catch up.

On the other hand, when any newbie can extract a competitive amount of resources by choosing a good building and putting the effort into getting it completed, the playing field remains much more level.)

[jakbruce2012]

Bear in mind, max size ships in the old building system were also supposed to take months to get to. Although not because of resources. A few exploits with research allowed a quick path around this however, new players would have just as much trouble then.

As it is now, a single ore colony can still produce 2-3m+ per hour, unless you are really unlucky with your scans and only find good resources on 1800m moons.

Don't forget, there is also the option of working together to get enough systems free of decay.

[Deantwo]

Allowing overlap is not necessarily the proper solution; it's just that, till now, it provided a workaround for a genuine problem.

As everyone is pointing out, the problem is that yields are so low.

Only really an issue if you are constructing buildings that are very big.
In the very beginning you are supposed to stick to smaller buildings, which is why it is so confusing to new players when they have access to the whole public building blueprint exchange.

Except that now, there is also a hard limit on the number of planets you can own without decay, and it's not high enough to get a good extraction rate.

Limited number of systems per empire member, not planets. Don't colonize tiny systems with only one world. Group up with other players to form an empire.

All that said, yes I also like the idea of more advanced mines being able to have more jobs per rock. But such advanced mines should require advanced resources and also be costly to construct. Either it should be a special module option in the building blueprint that adds advanced tools and materials to the construction cost, or at least require that the building is constructed with one of the more advanced construction materials.
See: Re: 2019-11-13 Resources, Manufacturing, Skills

[Vectorus]

Although not because of resources

This is the point. All the old reasons why big ships took ages to build remain the same: research (patents) and process run times. What has changed is that getting top-level ships now requires orders of magnitude more material than it used to. 

The size of the pitch is bigger but the players are running at the same speed, so the game as a whole has got slower. Given that there's not much to do except build stuff, and building stuff is the direct path to dominance and victory in this game, that slowing of pace is a bad thing. And, as I've pointed out, the worse it gets the bigger the advantage to those who gain an early lead.

I've not said anywhere that it should be trivial to get access to higher resource flow - only that it should be possible, which right now it's not (without using the most server-unfriendly, counter-intuitive means).

A building with a harvester bay would be a fine solution, I'd welcome that - its size is tied to world volume limit and it requires advanced materials to build. Only it needs to actually happen and not just be wistfully dreamed about on-and-off on the discord.

(If your systems are limited, your planets are limited. Planets live inside systems)

[Deantwo]

The size of the pitch is bigger but the players are running at the same speed, so the game as a whole has got slower. Given that there's not much to do except build stuff, and building stuff is the direct path to dominance and victory in this game, that slowing of pace is a bad thing. And, as I've pointed out, the worse it gets the bigger the advantage to those who gain an early lead.

People wanted bigger ships, they got bigger ships. The fact that some feel like they need to reach maximum sized ships before they can do anything is silly, especially if they start complaining about it taking a lot time to make/get them.

Yeah it is horrible that we just had a few years of easy-mode with massive mining buildings that broke any resource supply balance.

Either way it would be silly to change it before we actually get to test it with a refresh start. Even if I do like the idea of more advanced mining buildings.

I've not said anywhere that it should be trivial to get access to higher resource flow - only that it should be possible, which right now it's not (without using the most server-unfriendly, counter-intuitive means).

A building with a harvester bay would be a fine solution, I'd welcome that - its size is tied to world volume limit and it requires advanced materials to build.

Why would you want a building to have a harvester bay? That is silly and would make it use server resources when it wouldn't have to. A simply way to make advanced mines that double possible jobs per rock would be much simpler and easier.