[4.20 HF2] FEEDBACK / BUG - No Reinforced Metal Plating - Improved in update

theManx · Post by **theManx** » Wed, 13. Sep 17, 17:35

Thanks Birdtable. Please excuse my brain fart!
Yes, Reinforced.

I'm hovering over TER HQ now so I'll dart over and give your suggestion a try

tuyijop · Post by **tuyijop** » Wed, 13. Sep 17, 17:41

Hi themanx...do you use an mod ?
I have same problem...but i m inhollyday i
And i don't can try the new update...
I have take the mod for walk in station and idon't remember if this problemcome before or after....ihave uninstallthis mod with a cleanersave but i hadalways this problem

Maybe with new update this is ok for me....i know this friday night

Sorry for my English

theManx · Post by **theManx** » Wed, 13. Sep 17, 18:34

Hi Tuyijop,
I wasn't because most mods were meant for older versions anyway.
I did try one 2 days ago but I'm ready to drop all mods the instant I suspect there is an issue with the software.
Theres nothing worse than complaining about a software problem to the manufacturer when its caused by some junk I added.

theManx · Post by **theManx** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 08:07

OK, I may have hit a noob wall, not sure.
I'm in Home of light. Yes I able to build a ship because the shipyard was hording over 3K of RMP. Cool! After the ship I tried my luck at a construction site, got one no problem but then again I never had a problem building the construction ship, it was asking it to build that was where the troubles started.

Ahh yes you would be right if your realizing that Shipyards don't build the station, just ships so the shipyard's lovely pile of RMP does me no good at all for my station (Greedy devlis).

I check my trusty trade computer and it shows that I'm buying a bunch of RMP (in green) for my station build but interestingly, the sell side has no RMP listed. Yup I have an agent on the target station (District 6 Construction shop)

So Off I go to District 6. Its 100% scanned already so I check the stations container storage tanks.. The container was empty but when I looked at production it was just finishing a load which it deposited into storage. In the mean time I scanned every trade deal on the ship. No effect.

By this point I was trying anything. When I select the resource in the storage tank and try to get my cargo ship to come buy it, the NEXT button is grayed out.

Every video on trading talks about sending your ship for items that appear in the seller list but none speak of getting it from an Arms Tech Fab 1 that's just sitting on it.

What am I missing?

Thanks

Post by **Sparky Sparkycorp** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 08:58

Arms Tech Fabs produce RMP as an Intermidate Ware prior to using the RMP to build other final Product Wares. Stations tend not to sell Intermidate Wares very often.

If you give the Achitech enough money, NPCs will eventually deliver RMP to them. Or if you assign a Container Ware-capable Trade ship to the Architect too, it will eventually find RMP within the system automatically if it is sold in the system the CV is in, even if you've not seen the Trade Offers (e.g. Albion, OL and HoL).

theManx · Post by **theManx** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 09:23

Yup, It was going to TER Arms Tech Supply 1.
Well I have a Rahanas just sitting there waiting for some RMP to pick up so Ill assign it to the Architect like you suggested.

Thanks.

birdtable · Post by **birdtable** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 09:38

@ theManx .... Take note build your construction within the "system" where RMP is produced.. unless some magic happens ...

vadiolive · Post by **vadiolive** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 10:23

build at last 2 RMP most fast you can give you decent profit and materials to keep building

usual i build in omicron larye 2x Hardware Supplie without chemical
in every game i start

Post by **j.harshaw** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 17:06

Hi,

we have been discussing possible solutions to help assuage this situation, and are at a point where we're ready to test. If someone could be so kind as to donate a save where the game is in a fairly advanced state and where Reinforced Metal Plating supplies in Albion are chronically short, it would be of much help and would be greatly appreciated.

birdtable · Post by **birdtable** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 17:50

If you build a Ship Tech Fab to supply Fusion Reactors you will then suffer a severe lack of microchips.. Had to build High Tech Fab just for microchips.. Everything appears balanced now. With Metalworks, Construction Shop, Ship Tech and High Tech stations......

theManx · Post by **theManx** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 19:22

@BirdTable I did, just the other side the highway from of District 8 which is only 2 stops down from district 6, the construction shop in the same sector that produces RMP.

I've left the game running now for over 6 hours. I Assigned my Rahanas to my architect on Sparky's suggestion after I discovered the game utilizing an underground locked economy.

My station is growing but SLOWLY. It no longer NEEDS anything and looks like its about 3 quarters done.

Hind sight is 20/20 and I have about a week of diagnostic work behind me in this, so the nagging questions I have are about this underground locked economy. I spent a good 3 hours last night investigating the construction shop to try to understand;
1. Why it was producing and storing RMP but not making it available for sale.
2. Why with a production schedule from just ONE of the multiple plants showing 370 units per 15 minutes (roughly) , the construction shop wasn't accumulating any stock beyond that of s single production run.
3. How the NPC ship was able to buy the stock roughly every 15 minutes and it wouldn't even list as a trade item sold by a station for me
4. Why a trade of product from one station to another for any purpose, would be hidden from the trade computer entirely.

I finally had to monitor the construction shop and watch all ship comings and goings to discover the movement of goods and the station the ship was working for.

Now I get the element of leaving things for discovery to make it challenging but lets face it, in the context of a trade economy in a game, putting an underground economy is akin to turning space into a gigantic invisible maze that you have to navigate by collisions alone, just to make things more "challenging". Its making things difficult just for the sake of making them difficult. Its extreme and I have a lot of trouble believing anyone thought that up as an intentional thing to do to the game.

As a programmer of 37+ years I know the older and more complex the code, the greater is the chance of a nasty foul up from innocent changes. This smells like an RMP balance change that went horribly wron and thankfully didn't have the same impact on the former DLC module as it did the rest of the environment.

birdtable · Post by **birdtable** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 20:42

Been playing Egosoft games ever since they started selling them . As I said ..."unless some magic happens"
There is no economy... well no real economy... You have to deny economic reality accept illusion and learn to bend a little ,, over the years I have become very bendy..
The task is to create a miniature self sufficient empire of your own ,, because that is all there is.
Wait untill you try the warehouse ....

The challenge is not to make money but make an efficient distrubution service within your constructions .. like a giant model railway......

theManx · Post by **theManx** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 21:17

Actually, I think those were the very words my government representative said when he informed me I had to pay more taxes.

DUDE.. Seriously.. Do you really believe anyone who plays a game building space stations and fending off alien attacks is inflexibly attached to reality?

I'm real happy for you in your "Bendiness". I personally like it when the fantasy I PAY for has enough consistency to adhere to its own imagined version of a reality.

This isn't an existential experience. This is a broken product that has promise and an effort to help it realize that promise. This forum thread is a testament to that very fact.

If you would like to accept that there is no bug, just the illusion of a bug, more power to you. Follow the white rabbit

Ezarkal · Post by **Ezarkal** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 21:54

theManx wrote: 3. How the NPC ship was able to buy the stock roughly every 15 minutes and it wouldn't even list as a trade item sold by a station for me

From personal experience (non-vr version), wares that are in super-high demand simply gets sold fast. In the campaign of the original game, there is a similar issue with fusion reactors at the point where you have to build your first station. So when a production cycle finished, there's a short delay before the wares gets shown on the trade menu, then it takes less than a minute before everything gets sold out. Wares are then "kept aside" for the factions that bought them until their ships can come and pick them up.

Now, I don't have XR:VR, but the way I understand it they removed some of the NPC stations (to help with performance issues, I assume). As they did that, they accidentally removed the only two construction shops in albion, so there's simply no production of RMP in that system, which might be why they sell like hotcakes in other places. I believe ES is already on the case in order to address that. The game is still in early access after all.

I get that it's a huge problem, especially for new players that may not know every small quirks of the game (and the game has a lot of them). But at the same time, it's early access. ES will fix this. In the meantime, try to build your own construction shop in albion. It should yield massive, massive profits. Using your own traders to manually buying the RMPs from OL and HoL to facilitate building will speed up the process massively. (NPC universe traders tend to be few and far between.) Make sure the station producing the ware as end product are well supplied, and be quick to buy and you should be fine.

As for your station building super-slowly, how many construction URVs do you have assigned to your CV, and how many are in use? Among the numerous quirks I mentioned above, here are a few that are good to know.
1- Each station type got different building speed, usually in relation to the station's price.
2- the 5 construction URVs (cURVs for short) mentioned in the upkeep mission are usually barely sufficient to build your station. If you only have 5, it will be slow. Try to get between 20 and 40 to speed up the process
3- Assigning new cURVs during the build will not change anything, since your CV will only use the cURVs it had on board when you started up the building process. They will be used for later stage, though.
4- It also means that if all your cURVs gets wiped out in a pirate attack, your station will never get finished. (Unless this was patched recently???)
5- Following the same patterns, ordering too quickly the build of a second module once the first one was finished is not a good idea: Only the drones that will have time to dock before the build order is given will be used for the next time.
6- A good workaround for point 4 and 5 is to be "out of sight" (in another zone/sector) while the station is building: Drones will still be counted for build speed, but they won't get actually launched. So they'll be safe from raids and always ready for the next steps.
7- Building "out of sight" is simply faster, somehow.

theManx · Post by **theManx** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 22:56

Hi Ezarkal,
Thanks, that made a lot of sense. I really appreciate your answer on that question.

As for the rest of it, I know its early access.. For the VR version. I also know the base product is over 10 years old and in the past couple weeks have spent a massive amount of time reading through Egosoft & Steam threads about all sorts of problems. This particular one has been mentioned as far back as 2013. Actually many of the solutions I have found have been from complaint and bug forums dating back as far as 2007. So suffice to say much of this has gone on a very long time.

I don't waste my time. I spend it where I believe there is value. I believe this game has some value and thus the only reason I'm posting anything. That having been said, messages like, "It's not a priority right now" which has has been used in this thread help explain the continued existence of a 4 year old issue that has annoyed and lost players. Due respect to Sparky's more recent efforts to get this on the table.

Truth be known, someone in the Oculus ratings feedback posted the game was a broken waste of time because of this exact RMP problem and urged people not to waste their money on it. These kinds of things are like house bugs. If you see one, there are hundreds more you don't see. I'm fighting hard not to accept that feedback as true. Sadly I'm beginning to see its uphill.

Boeng01 · Post by **Boeng01** » Thu, 14. Sep 17, 23:24

j.harshaw wrote:Hi,

we have been discussing possible solutions to help assuage this situation, and are at a point where we're ready to test. If someone could be so kind as to donate a save where the game is in a fairly advanced state and where Reinforced Metal Plating supplies in Albion are chronically short, it would be of much help and would be greatly appreciated.

Thx for getting into it, finally

What exactly is a 'fairly advanced state' for you? From my experience, the problem occurs especially at early stages, whlie trying to build your first stations to start the production of those extremely rare products. As soon as those are delivering (RMP and Fusionreactors), everything starts to work out, at least this is what i felt in the games i started.

Post by **j.harshaw** » Fri, 15. Sep 17, 02:13

Boeng01 wrote:What exactly is a 'fairly advanced state' for you?

Around a hundred hours in would be good. Simply making RMP more abundant is easy, but exactly how abundant is rather tricky. We're hoping to find the sweet spot where, in an advanced save, the ship rights itself without causing imbalances.

Post by **Sparky Sparkycorp** » Fri, 15. Sep 17, 02:31

Semi-related thought on trade balance in XRVR:

IIRC, each successive DLCs added a small number of additional galaxy trader NPCs to ensure at least a little inter-system trade occured in classic XR.

Did XRVR have the total number of such NPCs adjusted to match the VR galaxy's adjusted layout? I imagine "yes" but it seems relevant to ask in the context of this thread.

birdtable · Post by **birdtable** » Fri, 15. Sep 17, 20:45

I have 4 stations with 15 trade ships plus another 20 traders and they are working flat out trying to service 4 stations... (buying small lots as they become available and because of small repeated deliveries congestion occurs)
Spacefuel as an example ... at the moment I need around 40000 and there is 0 to be found .. I have bought it all...
Need more NPC Trader Ships and they need to be fully stocked....

Edit ... Having checked a bit more, there are a large number of NPC TradeShips travelling empty looking for trades which do not appear to exist because stations are also short of commodities.

You can sleep next week.....

tuyijop · Post by **tuyijop** » Mon, 18. Sep 17, 01:45

Same for me...the main plot don't work ...after few wave...nada !! eveywhere...every galaxy...after 97 hours....and no plating metal reinforced...for constructibg station....97 hours to turn around....Pfff

Comments split and merged with other report. Plot comment noted. But please try to keep other reports to their own thread (to stop them de-railing e.g with the below comment.) Xenon_Slayer

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[4.20 HF2] FEEDBACK / BUG - No Reinforced Metal Plating - Improved in update