I don't think you are entitled to speak for anybody but yourself.ezra-r wrote:We don't want Rebirth, we want a real game.
And what's your Point? Getting their station module schemes won't make them more "fun". Xenon would be still mere terrorists. Actually building Xenon modules yourself makes Xenon less mysterious, less alien and less different.ezra-r wrote:I disagree completely.
Although what I described was merely an example, not a perfect design of how they should be (Egosoft does not pay me to think for them), the reason I meant this and the Xenon being better and tougher to get is to have interesting endgame goals, this possibly being one of them.
Xenon are about the most "alien" "particular" "different" race Egosoft has, so unless they plan to add another misterious race with something cool to get from them, they may probably end up like in Rebirth, mere terrorists like pirates which just roam and kill everything on their way = not fun.
I'm totally pro Xenon module schemes and making them harder to get as I already stated in the opening post. But making them superior only makes commonwealth modules obsolete once you aquiered the xenon counterparts. It subtracts more than it adds.
So let's say I've got a Teladi module ("+ 5% output") for an intermediate product and a Split module ("-5% manufacture speed") for the final product (just to stick to your examples).ezra-r wrote: There must be particular far away goals one the game must have to make sandbox interesting. Sandbox with no direction in particular is not really fun. Different race modules with different buffs well designed for player needs, and some of them hard to get would add lots of playability to a sandbox game, players like choices, meaningful if possible.
Of course if you design this idea correctly, factories would end up with mixed race modules, depending on the player needs and what the player has managed to achieve, with high level players ending up with some factories with the best of the best, if they can achieve it.
And let's say input, output and cycle time (unlike previous X games) are not connected, which means a reduced cycle time does not reduce the output and the requiered amount of resources per timeframe.
To make this more clear, in X3 the amount of crystals produced by a large crystal fab per hour remained the same across all races and the energy cells per hour that are necessary to produce the recources too. 5% more output would also mean 5% more input and 5% increased cycle time. If we keep this, all those buffs are pointless.
So we assume this wont be the case this time.
The Teladi module for the intermediate product produces X + 5% (or 1.05X) per cycle, so after 20 cycles your station produced the amount of 21 cycles without that buff.
The Split factory module for the final product needs only 95% cycle time, which leads to more finished cycle within in the 20 cycles of the Teladi module and therefore increased resources per timeframe. Do math, 20/0.95 is around 21.0526 cycles.
Math again, the produced amount is the equivalent of 21 cycles, the necessary amount is the equivalent of 21.0526 cycles, which means you're short of resources for the final product. Or with other words, every 21 cycles your Split module is lacking resources for 5.26% of a cycle.
Solutions:
- ignore it (so much for "meaningful" choices)
- only use Split modules (single race stations as mentiones before)
- egosoft makes input and output depend on cycle time (which I ruled out above)
- egosoft carefully calculates the buffs so it all cancels out (which ultimately ends up being the same as the previous option)
That being said, I'm not opposed to making modules more than just visually different. For example you could make them different in their capacities/volumes (Teladi crystal fab modules could resemble large crystal fabs from X3 while the Split ones resemble medium crystal fabs, keeping the 5/2 ratio)
