Planetary Resource View and Show Resource Nodes

[martianant]

I've found it's kinda frustrating placing mines/wells with the new node based system. It's entirely unclear where nodes are since they are near impossible to see, especially at night. It makes it very frustrating to try and place your building on these nodes to maximize output, and since you can't overlap buildings (which is good) you want to get as much as you can under one building.



How many gems are for the first gem icon? 8? 7? is the 8 pulling one from the second gem icon? Getting 11 gems on this mine is nice, but how much is that leaving out on the left or right? Would it be better to do 2 mines? Would you get more? You gotta try all combinations to figure it out. Time consuming, frustrating.

I propose that while you have a building in hand, the nodes should show up as little points color coded. So in this case the red would be gems, and the white is the stone.


This field would not spread far past the building outline, so as to not clutter the screen, but it would show you enough information to inform your decision on where to actually place the building.

On a similar note, a planet tells me it has 1% oil and 1% ore. Ore is everywhere, very abundant. But oil? Well I searched for an hour and couldn't find any in my resource zone. 1% for both? You sure? To ease with this frustration, I suggest allowing ships to scan a planet for resources, and this would then allow a new use for the surface map. After a planet is scanned for resources, the surface map will show a side bar/box with a selection for planetary resources. When selected, it will show a rough estimation for where these resources are. The estimation is a little vague, so it won't be at the exact coordinates, but close. You still need to search, but now you don't need to search the entire planet.

Resource view with Oil selected, shows that there is oil in zone 3, it just happens to be down near the pole!

[Neils Iyssada]

Upping this thread as this is really interesting.

[QuakeIV]

This would be really nice...

[Rockinsince87]

That map is a really cool idea. 

Even just having color squares if icons are not doable would work with the resource filter. Make them flash to help? Lots of potential here

[GaelicVigil]

I like both of these ideas, especially the second one. I've always thought it made sense that ship sensors should be able to detect where resource deposits are at. Perhaps this would work better in a new console station: Stellar Cartography.

Concerning the first idea, I'd maybe require a University first before you get to see this level of detail.

[xxqpxx--PMW]

Sounds like you had oil, but maybe no surface nodes. Would need a harvester ship for that