2018-09-19 Building Quality of Operation Nerf

[Haxus]

Building Quality of Operation
The quality of operation of buildings is confusing. It imposes a year long delay on new empires before they can compete fairly with other empires.

Building quality of operation removed.

• With the removal of building quality of operation, tech items no longer serve any purpose.
  
• Mass media building no longer produces tech items. Mass media building does nothing at all any more. It might be repurposed as a morale building.
  
• Repair shop quality is no longer a factor when repairing or recovering spacecraft.
  
• Detection range of buildings now appears on the building design analysis.
  

Deep Space Detection Range
Buildings and cities have a maximum range for detection of signals emitted by solar systems. This range is incorrectly calculated, based solely on the quality of operation of the building, not the size of the sensors.

Changed calculation for deep space detection range to be based on sensor range. The maximum range possible is around 600pc. The Airport Radar 1000M blueprint in the exchange has a range of 9.3pc.

Spacecraft Detect Emissions
Someone suggested that spacecraft participate in the detection of system emissions.

Spacecraft with sensors will now detect emissions from solar systems.

• Deep space detection range is reported on the design analysis.
  
• As with cities and buildings, emissions from the solar system containing the ship are not detected.
  
• Systems only emit their signal once per six hours. A spacecraft would have to loiter that long in a system, to detect every possible signal.
  
• The ship itself does not indicate when it detects a signal. It just responds appropriately so the star map gets updated.
  

Building Quality of Construction
Buildings always show a quality of construction of 1.

Fixed construction process to establish quality of construction upon completion. Quality of construction affects weapons, shields and sensors.

This is not a new factor on new style buildings. Old style buildings do not store their quality of construction.

Lockup at Transporter Station
Client program locked up when I viewed the sensor mode screen on a transporter station. The ship was at a ringworld.

Slapped console display code that decided to draw the ringworld using 18M line segments. It won't be doing that again.

Spacecraft Blueprint Quality Limits
The size of spacecraft blueprints is limited by two factors. The quality of construction limits the overall size. The quality of life support limits the number of berths. This puts an unfair limitation on new players.

Removed spacecraft blueprint size limit progression based on quality. Removed berth limit due to life support quality.

Vague Indigenous Directions
It was requested that the indigenous give a slightly better description of the location of a place they are telling about. "Less than 10km northeast" is a lot of terrain.

Indigenous directions were improved. They now use intermediate directions, such as "north-northeast", to give a better indication of direction. They also estimate the distance to the nearest kilometer, such as "about 7km".

[Mr. Mortius]

So the only form of progression that doesn’t take a day or two to finish is now just a series of dice rolls each time a new system is scanned? Sounds fun and engaging. Back to afk scanning, I guess.

[AnrDaemon]

If you get all Q255 resources exploited and transported within a day or two of character spawn, you're very lucky.

[Mr. Mortius]

You must have missed the exception to the day or two part, somehow. “A series of dice rolls” is the process of finding Q255 resources. Colonizing or exploiting those sources takes very little time, once they are found. Transportation consists solely of broker shipments. Because patents no longer are affected by building quality, the only thing they are affected by is the quality of resources used, again the dice rolls.

Still, if you are convinced that building the colonies to harvest the materials will take longer, in spite of my opinion being based off of actually doing so, we’ll lengthen the day or two to a week. The rest requires so little engagement that it can be done almost entirely afk. Maybe you haven’t seen the two characters belonging to Vectorus or the one belonging to me online nearly 24/7, but the whole afk thing seems to be catching on. It’s the best way to progress in the game now, after all.

[expert700]

So the only form of progression that doesn’t take a day or two to finish is now just a series of dice rolls each time a new system is scanned? Sounds fun and engaging. Back to afk scanning, I guess.

I too worry that the complete removal of building quality amounts to removing the last part of the game that constituted real progression gating.

[Mr. Mortius]

I should add to the above that it is entirely possible to have full Q220+ resources in just 1-2 systems, if someone is content with a slightly inferior product.

Everyone wants Q255. Few people like to be held back, whether it’s through building quality or tech levels. Putting up a poll asking if people would rather get the best tech right from the start, or should be required to put something in to get something out, doesn’t make much sense. It is the job of a game developer to put down obstacles, that are fun to overcome, between what players start with and what they want. If every time someone complains about a core limitation it gets removed, I don’t see where the challenge and reward from playing Hazeron will come from.

Tech levels, although they had flaws, provided a gradual expansion of a player’s capabilities over time. New abilities were added to a player’s selection based on how far they had progressed. This was deemed too limiting by some, so it was reduced to quality.

Under the quality system, the size of ships was still limited by the quality of the resources used. Players had access to pretty much any of the ship functions from the early game. Warp 9 went from being an end-game feature to being slightly more difficult to obtain than plastic. Resources found could be improved as a player’s empire grew, which was a positive of the system, and better ships could gradually be constructed. People could do what they wanted from the start, they were just limited in scale. Again, there were some flaws, such as players being unable to affect the rate at which they advanced, but the other limitations were positives, giving something to aim for. Apparently this was still too restricting.

Without quality, the only progression left is from the bonus curve quality provides. People complained once again that although they could do anything from the start of the game, it wasn’t enough, and they should be able to build any sized ship they want from the start, with no limits on the quality bonuses for those ships. A new empire, with 1-2 systems, can now match most of the capabilities of an old empire with hundreds of systems.

To sum up how I see this change: I want a billion dollars, tomorrow, but without putting in any work. That’s not how things work for a reason, and if it were, those billion dollars would be worthless.

[AnrDaemon]

Yet again, you are discussing it like the game won't ever change.
While in fact, the current state of the game is rather shallow, with or without your dear "quality" progression.

[Mr. Mortius]

I’m noting a trend, not just the current state, which is a direct acknowledgement of the fact that the game is changing. I’m starting to think you don’t read before posting. How does removing most of the remaining progression from an already shallow game help, if that’s how you see it? What is the current plan to replace the quality method of progression, since you seem to think the game will change soon to include it? Maybe it was removed without adequate thought given to what would replace it.

I am not attached to quality progression specifically, just as I was not attached to tech levels. I am, however, interested in there being some kind of system ready to replace the existing one before it is taken out. I’m not surprised you don’t care about progression though, since your empire has been stagnant for years. The same could be said of my own in terms of technological progression. Different parts of the game have different priorities for different people, that is a given. It would be best to hear the opinions of new players who have just started in addition to our own, I think, but I’m not sure there are very many of those.

[Deantwo]

You don't need to worry that much. Yes we wanted "buildingQL" gone because it was no fun and kinda confusing to work with. But that doesn't mean that a new technology mechanic won't replace it later.

Preferably a new technology system wouldn't limit quality of resources harvested, so we can reliably trust the resource quality numbers we find to be what they are when harvested.
Something that isn't bound directly to buildings types, and isn't a passively increased by doing absolutely nothing.

The old "TL" system was better in a few ways, but also not perfect. Reseaching was affected by the size of your empire's tax income, so you could actively increase the rate of research by expanding.
But just like the "buildingQL" it also had flaws, such as being pretty much non-existent the moment you had max level. Apart from having to propagate it to all colonies there was no interaction with either system.

Blasting a veteran empire back to the literal stoneage has always been impossible, because all a prepared player had to do is save a few tech disks in a safe place and rebuild their cities. But for a new player who doesn't know about this it could be way way worse, since they would have to wait for "TL" or even a year for "buildingQL".
If technology is that easy to save there is no reason to defend if you can just move away, and players aren't punished as badly for not knowing the meta of tech disk saving.

Only advantages of the "buildingQL" system was: to increase the quality of harvested resources later on, being passive and require no maintenance at all, being possible to max out without ever leaving your home world, a small empire and a large empire increasing at the same rate, and somewhat indicating the age of an empire (or their benefactors).
Only one of which I would consider really good, and maybe another somewhat useful.

Apart from in increase in harvested resource qualities and "progression gating", can you think of anything good about it?

[Mr. Mortius]

Let’s not confuse my love of a good argument for worry. I’ll lay off that for now, since it seems it’s getting in the way of things.

My main criticisms still stand, as far as I can tell. I can’t think of any other good features, but I also don’t see any reason to throw out the positives along with the negatives. I do think your idea about better tools leading to increased extraction quality is a good one, since it keeps many of the benefits. I should point out that it isn’t really a form of tech that requires real maintenance though, since it would only require creating a manufacturing process for the tool, which could then be left running indefinitely.

I don’t see a simple way around the permanent tech either, since it is always possible to place a colony tens of thousands of sectors into deep space with whatever you would need to rebuild. Maybe we need the box back.