Making Industry more exciting

[Xelanthol]

Hey everyone. I've been having a ton of fun with starmade, at heart I'm an industry guy though. I love production, and being able to produce the resources used by the shipbuilders and the military people. I wanted to hear what kind of suggestions people have for industry in starmade.

Mining is fun enough, I wish we had a few more tools other then salv-cannon slaving, which is arguably the most efficient... I still laugh the one time I tried salv-missile.

Production itself though is somewhat stale. The most expensive component is the factory enhancers, which you just slap on in big cubes. I typically have several factories of each kind, tiered in the amount of product they produce, 1-5-25-100-1000. Reactor design is still pretty fun due to the whole virtual axis stuff to maximize efficiency, but once that's set up thats it. Setting up sorting chests is easy enough as well.

Not that this is the route starmade should go, but I had such a fun time in the early days of industrialcraft/buildcraft and mods of that sorts. Building the upper tier stuff required a solid manufacturing base, and on multiplayer servers it was awesome to see the differentiation of roles.

I would love to see some modular multi block structures involved in industry. Change the factories, microcapsule refineries, and disassemblers away from the single block (or rather, let the single block be the basic model) and allow some fun theorycrafting through multiple block types.

I'm excited for shipyards in the near future-Is there any other industry focused quotes from the devs?

Sorry for the long post, looking forward to some discussion.

 

[SkyHawk024]

They may have something planned for this actually, I believe Schine said something a while back about incorporating shipyards which would only mean that it would require ALOT more machinery to be able to produce a ship via blueprints since it will need something to supply the materials it may need to build. But dont hold me to it things may have changed.

 

[Xelanthol]

Yeah. I am really curious to see how shipyards are going to be done (I wish we had more info, even if it's just conceptual at the moment). The thing is though, without blocks that add functionality then you never need to invest a lot into industry.

In order for (large) shipyards to require significant investment, they need to be designed that way from the ground up. I hope this is thought of during the design process.

What I'd love to see is that shipyards are a main core of a base. Bigger shipyard = more resources required = allowed to build bigger ships. I wonder if shipyards will insta build ships from blueprints as currently, I sincerely hope not, even better if the process could be expedited using special blocks.

 

[SkyHawk024]

well if people are going to end up building a shipyard to build titan class ships and they probably will, that will need alot of raw material to be brought in and to be refined not to mention the constant search for parts or the ore, and or the material needed only adding to the industrial effect. Meaning fleets of mining ships!

 

[Kaamio]

Some sort of multiblock construct where you had to juggle efficiency and speed (and cost) a little bit might be nice. It wouldn't work with current enhancer system all that easy though... maybe if it altered the cycle speed and power draw so you can't just enhance the crap out of the efficient process, maybe even so bad as to make a 50x enhancer set draw 5 millions of energy every 10 second cycle while speedy config for hulls for example could make a couple of thousand every second or something.

Of course you can circumvent a lot of this, especially with docked power supply units and huge capacitors, but then again, isn't that the fun part?

However, if actual multiblock constructs are not appealing to implement, maybe we could use the slave system for factories. Cannon computer for speed, beam for efficiency and increased power draw for example, maybe use the enhancers as the main system blocks like they kind of are. Not sure if you should be able use both at the same time, maybe they could be secondary computer and effect computer and be available both at once... but that would probably prevent any sort of (possible) energy reduction from speed enhancer, which might still be ok.

For example: basic factory linked to 500 enhancers and cannon computer with 250 cannon barrels
cycle speed gains 50% buff, energy requirements per cycle same as normal.

Advanced factory linked to 50 enhancers and a beam computer with 50 barrels
cycle speed increased to 10 seconds, material requirements halved (100% effect), energy requiremet increased by loads

btw I'm operating on the premise that factory enhancers add some % value to the cycle cost that stacks, since it seems 2 factories with 500 enhancers eat less energy than one with 1000, so cannon computer link for speed would increase energy efficiency for producing maximum amount of modules in certain time, as you can increase the amount of cycles using less enhancers, thus getting more modules for the energy used in comparison to simple enhancer setup. Speed enhancing system could increase factory cycles by 100-150%, maybe.

Efficiency system, however is a bit more difficult to balance I guess. I see it as the more constant production method that doesn't give you a ship in any reasonable time, making, say, 20k weapon blocks for your 10k battleship (definitions...) is going to take a long time, an hour maybe. So, it should increase efficiency by reducing materials needed at the cost of cycle time and energy needed. Maybe start with again 100% increase in yield while cycle time could be increased to 10 seconds, meaning 6 cycles per minute at full efficiency. Increase energy requirement by up to... dunno, 10000%? Maybe balance it around 50 factory enhancers taking some 500k e/sec which would mean 5M per cycle, resulting in (51x6x60) 18360 modules per hour. A soft capped station could handle two of those at once, which is quite a bit but certainly not fast enough for many.

That might make it more appealing to make modules to storage (or for a certain project or blueprint) rather than just on demand.

If both enhancing systems were used at once, which I don't think is necessary and in my model not very interesting, cannon computer would just reduce cycle time. I guess this would lead into 20-30 enhancer factories with full efficiency, or some speedy factories for basic modules with 20-50% efficiency bonus... maybe it would add something, maybe not. Shouldn't be too hard to implement anyway since the mechanics mostly exist already.