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[ElPresidente]

Combing trough an entire debris field and brining useful stuff back - takes 0 seconds
Repairing your ship - takes 0 seconds.
Searching trough vast ruins, carting things back up - takes 0 seconds.
Surveying a planet - takes 0 seconds.

I could do all of those things and the fleet that chased me wouldn't have moved 1 mm closer to me in that time. It just feels wrong to me.
Passage of time ceases to exist.

[KDR_11k]

Most of those aren't allowed while you are being chased by another fleet.

[ElPresidente]

Most of those aren't allowed while you are being chased by another fleet.

The only blocking condition is that an enemy fleet is close by. I can be chased by 10 fleets, but if they are more than X units away, you cna loot and plunder and do whatever you want.


Isn't that how people usually loot Remnant-infestd systems? Draw their fleet ot chase you, then burn quickly to a planet and survey/seach it?

Time SHOULD pass.
"But who wants to look at the progress bar and wait?"
Then don't have a progres bar. Just snap the time forward instantly. Or move everything extra fast. Whatever works.
Then at least you have some suspense/dread - can you do X fast enough before the enemy fleet catches up? Hell, ships, hullmods or ships that help with that might actually be worth something. You can even have an option of a rush job (faster, but you get part of the loot), normal job or "double-check every corner".
Even better if doing it fast leaves loot you missed so you can return later and try again.

Right now it feels like cheating. Like I'm having a ZA WAURDO time stop to do things while the enemy patiently and obediently waits.
It may take me days to repair my havily damaged ships, but dock at a startport, hit repair and it's instant-repair magic.
It cheapens the entire experience and ruing my immersion.

[AcaMetis]

"But who wants to look at the progress bar and wait?"
Then don't have a progres bar. Just snap the time forward instantly. Or move everything extra fast. Whatever works.

Than what about if a fleet you didn't notice suddenly closes in and you've given no more than .02 seconds to respond? Because I assume the player's fleet would respond to such a thing even if the player doesn't have the time to do so, and them staying there like sitting ducks to keep picking up space trash would be even more immersion breaking. Looting taking time also wouldn't really change anything. You'd still do the same tried and true technique of luring dangerous fleet far away, burning past them and doing whatever looting you want to do before they come back. It'd just change how far away you have to lure those fleets.

Repairing at a space dock is faster because you're not sending dudes in EVA suits to weld the hull your ship back together in (hyper)space, or however that works (robotic repair units, maybe?). You can only repair at a colony when it has a functional space dock designed, among other things, for ship repair. Of course it's faster than repairing in space.

[ElPresidente]

Than what about if a fleet you didn't notice suddenly closes in and you've given no more than .02 seconds to respond? Because I assume the player's fleet would respond to such a thing even if the player doesn't have the time to do so, and them staying there like sitting ducks to keep picking up space trash would be even more immersion breaking.

Auto-pause?
Or just use a quicksave if you mess up. Or fight. That's a risk you have to take if you camp in enemy territory.

Looting taking time also wouldn't really change anything. You'd still do the same tried and true technique of luring dangerous fleet far away, burning past them and doing whatever looting you want to do before they come back. It'd just change how far away you have to lure those fleets

Can you really lure them that far away? That extra manouvering and planning does change things.
It also opens up possiblites for new ways to occupy enemies.

Setting up false signal transmitters for patrols to investigate, or even splitting your fleet so one part can lead the enemy away while the other loots. Ah, a man can dream, but I doubt we'll ever see something like that.

Repairing at a space dock is faster because you're not sending dudes in EVA suits to weld the hull your ship back together in (hyper)space, or however that works (robotic repair units, maybe?). You can only repair at a colony when it has a functional space dock designed, among other things, for ship repair. Of course it's faster than repairing in space.

Faster is not equal as instant.
Even the finest shipyards and machines working in double shifts, 24/7, still took DAYS, WEEKS to repair damaged ships during WW2, and it's not really any faster today.
More advanced technology may speed it up, but more advanced technology and bigger ships also means more stuff to repair and more difficult to repair.

[AcaMetis]

Auto-pause?
Or just use a quicksave if you mess up. Or fight. That's a risk you have to take if you camp in enemy territory.

Auto-pause could work. "Just savescum" less so, especially for people playing Ironman, but auto-pause could work.

Can you really lure them that far away? That extra manouvering and planning does change things.
It also opens up possiblites for new ways to occupy enemies.

Setting up false signal transmitters for patrols to investigate, or even splitting your fleet so one part can lead the enemy away while the other loots. Ah, a man can dream, but I doubt we'll ever see something like that.

If I can lure them 1 SU away I can lure them a million SU away, it's just a question of repeating the same motions more often. And doing ten manoeuvres instead of three doesn't sound like compelling gameplay to me.

The other possibilities...I'm not sure. I'd never trust the AI to pilot my fleet in a way that won't get all of those decoy ships killed, and it'd be a right logistical nightmare to code, I imagine. False transmitters is kind of like you doing a scan to attract distant attention, but something more flexible would definitely a nice addition. All those pirates and even a few remnants get hidden transmitters to notify distant fleets when someone tripped the sensor, surely the player could use that same idea against them somehow...

Faster is not equal as instant.
Even the finest shipyards and machines working in double shifts, 24/7, still took DAYS, WEEKS to repair damaged ships during WW2, and it's not really any faster today.
More advanced technology may speed it up, but more advanced technology and bigger ships also means more stuff to repair and more difficult to repair.

Probably not "instant", although the Persean Sector might have the kind of technology that reduced shipyard repairs to "close enough to instant". It at least sounds like it's definitely faster than WW2-era repair speeds, because from the sounds of it a WW2 ship couldn't have repaired itself up from "1% hull remaining" to "fully repaired and combat ready" in the span of a week while out at sea and moving forwards at regular speeds that entire time, like Persean Sector ships can put ships back together that thoroughly out in open space while travelling around like normal.

From a gameplay perspective I also don't know what interesting mechanics would come from repairs taking time. If time was an issue you'd just not repair at a spacedock and have your ships repair over time while going towards some time-sensitive objective, since dock repair is no better than space repair other than time. That, to me, is no more immersive than "repairs are instant". Hell, if anything I'd argue that instant repairs are more immersive than repairs taking time - it'd take nothing short of magic to pull that off in the modern era, so it's a good show of Persean Sector technology having become sufficiently advanced. As one would expect from an era of relatively casual FTL space travel (and after a Collapse, at that).

[Tartiflette]

I'll just mention that things not taking time is not a design decision but a technical necessity. If some actions start to take time, then everything has to do so for consistency sake. But then implementing loading bars for everything means everything has to manage a lot more failure and interruption states. Some actions would also have to handle partial results if you abandoned the action mid-way etc. Overall Alex deemed the massive increase in complexity on his side isn't worth the benefits.

[Cirevam]

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.

[SCC]

I actually like that repairs don't take any time to happen, it gives you home turf advantage.

[Badger]

Agree with OP, plus salvaging is boring in general. More possible (rare and/or unique) drops depending on source might be nice. Maybe some kind of minigame.

[robepriority]

Offensive actions like raids and bombardments, definitely.

Actions which don't have any risk like salvaging... not really. Preferably those would simply have more decisions on the text level rather than having to wait in the overworld.

[Zakaluka]

Isn't that how people usually loot Remnant-infestd systems? Draw their fleet ot chase you, then burn quickly to a planet and survey/seach it?

It's a lot safer to loot remnant systems with stealth, make a logistics fleet that's designed with a tiny sensor profile, high burn, at least two gantries, and a few thousand storage. Avoid detection.

Or bring a combat fleet that can beat the remnants. That's how you get alpha cores.

Dodging remnants to loot the system, unable to fight them, but also not able to avoid detection, is a really great way to get caught in a load-save loop.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

I'll just mention that things not taking time is not a design decision but a technical necessity. If some actions start to take time, then everything has to do so for consistency sake. But then implementing loading bars for everything means everything has to manage a lot more failure and interruption states. Some actions would also have to handle partial results if you abandoned the action mid-way etc. Overall Alex deemed the massive increase in complexity on his side isn't worth the benefits.

From a gameplay perspective, this is actually an excellent point.  The code in this game should be able to handle time dilation around black holes, but it doesn't? Why is that?

A more reasonable compromise would just be that certain activities (ie, salvaging and surveying) require that a player's fleet come to a full stop before initiating, so that if you want to do it and are being chased, you get caught/killed.  I would, however, advocate for some sort of time passage to be possible if you land on planet, game is so dumb that it requires that you waste supplies at your fleet's supply decay rate just hanging out in space over a planet if you have to wait for some reason (like for something to finish building at your colony).  Yes, I can hit shift or whatever to speed the game up, but still wasting supplies at the same rate (just equally accelerated).  This would be a deliberate action, not just added time tacked on 'cuz you took too long trading.

[SCC]

Having to stop to salvage sounds like a good idea.

From a gameplay perspective, this is actually an excellent point.  The code in this game should be able to handle time dilation around black holes, but it doesn't? Why is that?

Because the game is simulated. Constantly. Funnily enough, this matters less in the base game than Nex, since the world is largely static and the only big issue the player could face is expeditions that smash your stuff while you're on holidays.

[AcaMetis]

A more reasonable compromise would just be that certain activities (ie, salvaging and surveying) require that a player's fleet come to a full stop before initiating, so that if you want to do it and are being chased, you get caught/killed.

With the way that my fleet absolutely loves to swing back and forth multiple times before coming to an actual stop if I tell them to go somewhere this change would probably end up being more obnoxious than a progress bar.