Ship Building

[Beel]

Separate ship design from ship building, and make it take time to happen.

 

- Ship design is basically what you have now, and the person saves the ship design.

 

- Require all ship building to be done at ship making buildings. Nothing can be made without the ship making building.

 

- Make the building of ships, and modifications of ships take time. The time should be proportional to the size of the change. Small ships and small ship changes build very quickly. Large ships build very slowly. The amount of tons of metal can be used as the speed factor. As in, the building builds X tons of ship per minute. Minimum build time is 1 minute.

 

- The same for repairs. Repairs only happen at repair depots, and 1 minute per x tons of time to happen.

 

- The ship making buildings in the iron/titanium area doesn't have the ability to build with higher level metals. So to build a ship with certain metals, the player needs to have it built in an area capable of building with those metals.

 

 

[riess]

I worry that this approach paired with how annoyingly hard it already is to get something that both looks good and performs well would be a great turn off from the "survival" mode for people who already find it striking good balance between resource/material gathering and improving their hardware.

[Beel]

The problem is that as it stands right now, players are constantly changing their ship as needed at that second. Pirates show up and you change the upgrades to shield boosters. Pirates You want to move, change the upgrades to hyper space boosts. Etc. You shouldn't be able to change your ship makeup in the middle of nowhere, at a second's notice.

 

The game already allows a player to have multiple ships. They could easily fly one ship while the other is being worked on. So the player wouldn't be idle. They would just have to think and plan what upgrades they wanted installed BEFORE they needed them, and wouldn't be able to time share their upgrades mid-flight.

[Rockethrob]

The flexibility and building aspect of the game is one of the greatest appeals. Adding modification and building time in the way that you suggest would ruin the game.

 

However, if a player was required to have building drones on their ship that might work (and a building drone bay that, when destroyed, would mandate a return to the shipyard or a secondary repair ship). The more drones, the faster the building is completed and the more that can be done in a given time.

 

That's only if people think such an addition is necessary. Personally,  I feel the game is just fine the way it is in this regard. Realism clearly isn't the highest priority here.

[Beel]

Realism clearly isn't the highest priority here.

Oddly enough, it was the comment that I saw that said that the makers of this game tried for as much realism as possible, that was one of the major reasons I tried it to begin with. So I hope that your statement isn't the way that developers feel.

[Wanderer]

Honestly, i would hate it if i had to wait for my ship being built. However, i think it would be logical if you had to be in a shipyard (or the shipbuilding thingy if its called different), so you have to be close to it to built. If you have to design it first and build it afterwards, you cant test it whilst building.

 

For the modules, the devs want to implement something similar to whats mentioned before: if you mount a module in your ship, it will be better but it cant be removed. So you can choose, and i think that would be really nice.

 

Repairworks i think should only be possible at a repairdock if the shipyard (...) is needed for building.

[Kamo]

I'd like both building instantly through Build Mode (as doing otherwise would be impossible or very awkward) and shipyards taking time to make ships, but would be remotely ordered to do so, RTS/From The Depths style.

As a bonus the shipyard would evidently crew the built ship, and with quality crew, so the time lost building would be countered by the time gained by not messing around to gather crew :) !

 

I definitely share riess' and Rockethrob's opinions on how delayed building might turn off "survival" and "lone ship" players and ruin lots of fun... and it would also turn off newcomers who'd try to make their first ship in survival mode, as pirates would wail on their even more incomplete in-building ships :(.

I remember making trailers for my first ship to convert it into a cargo mid-flight, maybe other people like playing this way :D.

 

I'm also sharing Wanderer's "not be able to test the ship" worry, as it would mean testing energy production for hyperspace a tremendous hassle, especially for ships huge enough that modifiying their insides and replacing the armor would take minutes. And same thing for finitions (like "whoops forget to nail the armor with integrity fields on whatever place, need to hammer them before xsotan attack" ::)).

[Rockethrob]

Realism clearly isn't the highest priority here.

Oddly enough, it was the comment that I saw that said that the makers of this game tried for as much realism as possible, that was one of the major reasons I tried it to begin with. So I hope that your statement isn't the way that developers feel.

If realism was indeed a priority of theirs it isn't very obvious. Sure there is drift, but there is no fuel consumption, no planetary systems, no ammo consumption aside from torpedos, no gravity, etc.

The ship dynamics is great and one of the more appealing things, but it leaves a lot to be wanting as far as a 'simulator' experience like Elite Dangerous.

Not that I'm asking for an exact copy of that. If I wasted ED I'd play ED. Either way, I still deeply dislike OP's idea.