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univac1
New Member
Joined: 10 months  ago
Posts: 1
18/09/2016 12:06 am  

I'd first like to say that I love this game, and I hope you don't take any of this as disrespectful.

1) Should have the ability to set all batteries to auto-absorb power when there is a surplus of power, and auto-distribute power when there is a deficit. Would need to provide some kind of indicator that your colony is running on battery power (and perhaps by how much). Perhaps, when power generation is sufficient, the power icon in the resources bar could be green (with a green battery symbol & number indicating the accumulating stored batter power); when you're running a deficit, and taping into battery power, these could turn yellow with a red minus sign & number ("-26") indicating how much battery power you are using (and perhaps an estimate of when you will run out?); when you finally run out of battery power and are still running a power deficit, these could turn red, and the normal "out of power" system would engage.

1b) The auto-charge setting for the batteries should have a lower priority than power usage. Right now, batteries absorb a flat 10 power. Instead, this 10 should be the upper limit; i.e. the battery can absorb up to 10 units of power. Then, if there is only a 7 unit surplus, the battery could still absorb it, rather than getting nothing. All the batteries should be treated like a pool, and evenly distribute their absorption based upon what is available. Ex: if you have 4 battery banks, this would equal 40 units of power absorption capacity, and if there is only a surplus of 20 units, then each battery would absorb 5 units. This way, you could generate surplus in the summer, and when your power generation drops in the winter, you could live off the batteries; you just have to make sure you store up enough to last you through the winter. This would make solar panels a much more viable energy generation path when there aren’t enough geothermals, or you can't reach the zorium mine yet, or you don't have enough zorium.

2) Not sure if this one is already implemented or not; it didn't seem like it in my game, but I may have mistaken it. If a portion of the colony gets cut off (for example by a lightning strike destroying a connecting tunnel), if there is sufficient batteries/power-generation, it shouldn't all shut down. The isolated portion of the colony should be able to continue operation without catastrophic shutdown. If there is not enough power/batteries in the isolated chunk, perhaps it could partially continue operation using the "not enough power" state the whole colony enters into when there isn't enough power; only shutting down some buildings.

3) When setting water pumps from "Low Threshold" to "High Threshold" and back, this should affect all water pumps, not each one individually. I don't see any reason why someone would want to have multiple water pumps operating at different thresholds. However, if there is a reason, at least give the option; perhaps a checkbox to "synchronize all water pumps" so that when you change it in any water pump, your change propagates to all of them; similar to in the "Deactivate" power tab in buildings, where you can set the deactivation to effect "All buildings of this type". But I think for the water pumps, a checkbox would function better.

4) Have an overlay view which displays the food type on all the farms on the map, as the food type icon (corn, melons, entari, etc.) floating over the farms on the map. This allows you to survey what foods you are growing at a glance, rather than having to click each farm individually, and remember. Becomes absurd when you have 10-20 farms in a single area.

5) After selecting an existing farm, you can mouse over each soil square to get the specific growth factor for the selected food type for that tile. However, when placing a new farm (or before placing one), there is no way to do this except by moving the whole new farm object around (or by selecting an existing farm, changing its food type to the new one and mouse around, and then change it back). When dragging the floating "new farm" object around, farms are 4 tiles in area, but it appears to still only show the info for the single tile which the mouse happens to be over, but which one that is, is obscured by the floating farm building. There should either be a way to do the individual tile inspection by crop type, or the hovering farm placement object, should display (and clearly indicate as such) the total/average growth factor for the 4-block group.

6) There should be an overlay to see any buildings with job slots restricted. When first starting out a new colony, it is useful to block job slots in certain buildings to direct labor strategically. However, once you gain a sufficient population, it becomes more reasonable to life all (or most) job slot restrictions. However, by this point, you probably have many buildings, and going one by one to check if any have job restrictions becomes absurd. Either have a global button to clear all job restrictions from all buildings, or create an overlay to view on the map any buildings which have job restrictions in place (perhaps also with an indicator of the percent of jobs which are blocked? Not a must-have for me, but some might like it.).

7) Why do fully automated buildings like solar panels & storage facilities suffer a commute penalty when they are connected through another building rather than directly with a tunnel? If they are fully automated, then no one is commuting to it, so they should be immune to commute penalties, and therefore be perfectly fine in dense grids with zero tunneling between them.

thanks,
-Yurelle

 


Paul Tozour and MrData liked
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SRombauts
Active Member
Joined: 11 months  ago
Posts: 19
20/09/2016 10:14 pm  

Very nice post, with detailed explanation ! 

I share all of your concerns, and support your proposals. 

Cheers ! 

Unreal Engine 4 hacker, author of the Git Source Control Plugin

@SRombauts on Twitter


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MrData
Active Member
Joined: 11 months  ago
Posts: 10
21/09/2016 9:39 am  
  1. I absolutly agree, this would be very usefull. The combination with the solar panels would be very good, so you dont need tons of solar panels.
  2. For the second point my suggestion would to have a policy for automated tunel repair if there is a cut off, so that drones automatically restore the previous build connection.
  3. Also a very good point, I go with that one.
  4. Same as point 3.
  5. Saw this also, looks a little buggy.
  6. Would also be useful.
  7. Yep, buildings with no workers shouldn't have a commute penalty.

There is also something what drives me crazy:

If a mill or chemical plant runs out of raw material, there is a message that the production is turned off. This happens often in winter. But after winter is over and the raw material is gathered again, the production keeps to be disabled. You have to turn it on again manually... very annoying cause this can drive your colony into unnecessary trouble.

Greetings


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Paul Tozour
Reputable Member
Joined: 1 year  ago
Posts: 270
21/09/2016 7:39 pm  

Great suggestions!

1. We're considering various improvements to Energy Batteries, and something like this may be a part of it.

2. It's up to the player to make sure there's enough power and enough redundancy in tunnels to survive a tunnel getting taken out, and to use the manual shutdown as needed.  Note that the "Drone Auto-Repair" policy will be fixed in the future to replace tunnels destroyed by lightning.

3. We're considering some potential improvements to the Water Pump operational modes, and this may be a part of it.

4. Doesn't the Resources overlay already do this?

5. Individual tile inspection would be nice -- we'll see what we can do.

6. We agree and we'd like to add something like this if time permits.

7. I literally just fixed this 10 seconds ago and we're working to put out a new build that will not show any commute penalty for buildings that don't have any workers or residents.  Rest assured that there never was any real penalty being applied in this case anyway -- the Commute overlay was just being a bit over-zealous and showing a penalty where there actually was none.  Hopefully we'll have that build up by the end of the day.

Edited: 10 months  ago

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