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General Discussion / Re: Instant actions feel wrong
« on: May 28, 2021, 06:32:10 AM »
I agree with the OP. The click-click-click of everything has never felt right to me. Accomplishing any task in zero time with a few clicks and a fancy text blurb feels cheap. Those bits are less like a game and more like flicking a couple pages forward in a book to get to the better parts. It can also be a bit exploity... if there are multiple enemy fleets around a station, you can fight all of them at full CR and hull strength since dock repairs are instant. Just don't make the station owner angry and the CR system becomes nearly irrelevant for those fights.
But I'm not sure adding time to tasks is the right answer. As an example, mining in Nexerelin takes time. It used to hold your fleet next to the planet/moon/asteroid for about five seconds every time you mined. Now it's a cooldown, so mining is instant but you have to wait afterwards and can freely move around in the meantime. I do not know if the community requested that change or if it's something Histidine came up with on his own. I do know it feels better than the old way. Needing to wait five seconds before each mining action finished got annoying really quickly. Now you click, go, and are only forced to wait if you want to keep mining.
I don't think the current Nex mining system would work well with vanilla mechanics. We can only salvage debris fields one time now, so the cooldown is usually irrelevant. Dock repairs also only need to be done once. Surveys and ruin sweeps are the same, and planets aren't always close enough for cooldowns to matter, but sometimes they are. Would the old Nex mining method of forcing you to wait a few seconds every time you want to do one of these things be better? Keep in mind that we'll do these actions thousands of times over a run. That will add up and can greatly affect the player's perception of the game, even if a single wait event is so small on its own.
But I'm not sure adding time to tasks is the right answer. As an example, mining in Nexerelin takes time. It used to hold your fleet next to the planet/moon/asteroid for about five seconds every time you mined. Now it's a cooldown, so mining is instant but you have to wait afterwards and can freely move around in the meantime. I do not know if the community requested that change or if it's something Histidine came up with on his own. I do know it feels better than the old way. Needing to wait five seconds before each mining action finished got annoying really quickly. Now you click, go, and are only forced to wait if you want to keep mining.
I don't think the current Nex mining system would work well with vanilla mechanics. We can only salvage debris fields one time now, so the cooldown is usually irrelevant. Dock repairs also only need to be done once. Surveys and ruin sweeps are the same, and planets aren't always close enough for cooldowns to matter, but sometimes they are. Would the old Nex mining method of forcing you to wait a few seconds every time you want to do one of these things be better? Keep in mind that we'll do these actions thousands of times over a run. That will add up and can greatly affect the player's perception of the game, even if a single wait event is so small on its own.