I didn't say that you are stupid. Nothing I have said has been mocking. I believe my messages to be neutral in tone, but you are interpreting it as hostile/mocking. I am a little frustrated because you are personally attacking me and are seemingly not understanding my point, but my intention is to not be hostile or make it personal. I am simply explaining my position.Midnightknight wrote: ↑Mon, 7. Jun 21, 16:03 Yes you are the one using the hyperbole here, using the "Motto" of X3 to show i'm stupid and my opinion is irrelevant, and what you were saying could be easily used against you. Think, you want a mule, you can buy it in mission at discounts, you can force them to bail, you can use an agent to raise your rep to +4 with split, send 1 or 2 ozias in split core system, stuff them full a mules you bought and jump back home. Yes that's annoying, yes that wouldn't fit every gameplay and but it's exactly the same than what you said. Resources are not an issue you could have plenty of them, use your brain. Ships aren't a problem you can have plenty of them. Yes i'm hostile to your position cause you are mocking people with biased statement just to prove you are more intelligent and your point is the only one right, i'm simply returning you the favor.
If CBJ's response was towards me as well because he believes that I have been hostile/personal, then I encourage him to state what I have done wrong so that I can be more careful in the future.
Anyway, I was saying that for every other mechanic in the game except for HQ ship production, you can scale it up to meet your needs. If you need more crystals, you build more crystal fabs. If you need more lasers or shields for your fleet you build those appropriate factories. You don't have this ability with the HQ. As we've both said, you can buy or capture the Mule. But, due to the HQ timer being too long, you can never really build it. Thus, only TRADE and FIGHT are viable, not BUILD.
The variety that you have indicated with acquiring the Mule is not the same as the variety you have with the HQ, due to the timer. You can capture or buy as many Mules as you want because they are not artificially locked by anything. They can be infinitely purchased at Shipyards, and are relatively common to find in space. To compare it to the HQ problem, it would be like if there was a 12 hour cooldown at the AI Shipyard each time you buy a Mule. In this circumstance, buying Mules is a mechanic which exists, but its implementation makes it virtually useable. This is how the HQ currently exists. You can never use the HQ to reasonably produce Mules because it has a 12 hour cooldown between each one. The same is true for most other ships. If you change the cooldown timer to based on resources rather than a static time limit, then you can reduce the cooldown by providing resources at a quicker rate. This results in less time overall, it just requires an initial investment. But, you would be making this investment anyway, because building stations is a large part of the game.
They benefit from it by acquiring ships and earning money by selling the excess production to other races. The idea to shift the focus to resources does that mean that everything is much more expensive. It is a change in weight, not an increase in total. For example, if a ship normally costs 10 million credits to produce, and requires 5 million credits worth of materials, under the new system, it could cost 2.5 million credits and require 12.5 million credits worth of materials. Of course, this is just a quick example and the actual balancing would require more consideration. But, the point is that the total cost is similar, so it does not add more grind. It simply moves the timer from an unchangeable static variable, to the timer of station production cycles. This change has a low impact on players who only want to build a handful of special ships, but has a big positive impact for players who want to scale HQ production up. And, it has extra benefits such as more interaction with the NPC economy, especially in the early game before you have your own economy setup. In the late-game, since the focus is now primarily resources rather than credits, it adds more activity with the logistical system and encourages a real economy rather than sitting on a hoard of credits.Midnightknight wrote: ↑Mon, 7. Jun 21, 16:03 You don't like SETA but you will force people to use it to build complex they will never benefits from cause a full feeding complex for a PHQ is millions of millions credits. And you want to increase this even more, meaning more time passed into SETA or stupid farming to be able to get your HQ working. So once again, YOU want to mass produce at PHQ, and you want to harass people that actually are not especially using the PHQ except for a few extra ships. So you increase the resources needed, so they will have to farm those resources even more while they simply don't want to, and have better things to do while the time needed wasn't a that big issue for them. Fun fact, the devs mentionned they wanted to make the player less overpowered in end game to have more challenge and a bit stronger at the beginning, so you are just going completely against that.
If you read this topic, and others messages across the forum that are critical of the current implementation of the HQ, the consensus is that because the HQ production queue takes so long, it is only viable for these special ships. I used the HQ to produce all the special quantum processor ships, and a few small normal ships, but that is all it is useful for because the timer is too high. The goal is for the HQ to be viable to produce whatever the player needs, not only a small selection of special ships.Midnightknight wrote: ↑Mon, 7. Jun 21, 16:03 Read this topic, you will see some people actually use the PHQ as a bonus to get a few special ship here and there while they are playing. So you increase the resources needed, so they will have to farm those resources even more while they simply don't want to, and have better things to do while the time needed wasn't a that big issue for them.
No, that is not what I am telling you. I was stating that the two problems are distinct so that they are not conflated together. The problems caused by scaling oddities such as the Mule shows the weakness of using a system that is strongly gated by a static time variable. No other mechanic in the game is gated in this manner. You could argue station resource production is gated by time, which it is, but you can alleviate the gate by building more factories. Comparatively, there is no recourse for the HQ. I directly said, multiple times, that the scaling of the Armoured Transports specifically makes them unviable to ever build. And, a rebalance to reduce these outliers, as well as other ships on the high-end of the scale is a good bandaid to fix the problem. Changing the gate from time to resources is one step further to improve the system, since it allows the player to engage with more of the game's systems. You don't agree with that, but that's ok. Don't take it personally.Midnightknight wrote: ↑Mon, 7. Jun 21, 16:03 So you are telling me your proposition have nothing to deal with the OPs topic? Yes that's true, you are completely off topic from the very start. What you offer solves no issues and brings new ones. The issue with RE times are mostly how badly they scales, and a few oddities like the I being pretty fast to RE while some M6 takes forever. Reducing global RE time won't change this, raising resource needed won't change this, only a global rebalance of the RE time calculation formula will.