DrDread

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9/8/2016 Topic: Vote for what to develop next 9/8/2016 Doctor Dread Administrator	So our Kickstarter has been funded and with the addition of the artifact effects the major features of the game are in place, granted they are slim on content but they are in place. From now on most the development is going to revolve around quality of life type improvements and interface changes to the game. Then we'll start adding more content, in the form of event mainly. Below are the most common requests for changes we've seen, you can all vote on what you would like to see first and we'll try to work on them in order. This is outside of bug fixes which we work on when we can: Distribution Center - Make a structure that produces nothing but can sell multiple products at once from the location. This enables you to send freighters to drop various products at a location and then leave without having to wait around to sell them. Being able to adjust the sell rates according the displayed demand and volume of your products in one place. Upping the level of the distribution center allows more product types to be sold at once and at a higher buy sell power. Copy/Saving Orders List - Once you have a set of orders for a unit in place you can "save" them to a list much like a bookmark and then apply it to another unit. Might also be able to have a few default order templates on your list for a generic "Transfer, move, sell, move back, loop" set of orders to choose from. Asset Screen Consumption Mode - Take away the search dropdowns/filters on the asset screen and replace with a set of "modes" you can set the asset list to. The default Overview mode will be what is there now but you can have a Production Mode which breaks up the list by location and has a total amount of products your factories are consuming at that location. Essentially re-arrange the list to show information in a way that is better suited for managing your factories and product movement. Selling Military Units to other players - This was a feature intended for Contracts but never made yet. You would have to deliver military units to a location for money or vice versa via contract. Probably only one shot deals on units that already exist that you can select. Battle/Comms notification via email - An interface on a new Corporate >> Settings tab that allows you to select the type of comm messages to send to an email address and how frequently to send them. You can declare Battle messages or perhaps Broadcast Comm messages, event messages etc. Please note that most mobile carriers have an email address that you can send texts to and it will send to your phone for free such a (number)@vtext.com for Verizon. You would be able to be notified of battles within minutes of them happening. The automatic messages and links would be adjusted to work better on mobiles. Trading Tools Reporting - The Corporate >> Reporting tab will be created and a couple of reports made to help to in common game needs such as "Find the highest value of X resource in Y planet with no more than Z amount of existing industry. And "Graph the sell price of X product in every city of Y system over the last week" Speed up the tutorial - Try to make the units spawn faster or instantly, not take two turns to construct etc. Mobile friendlier interface- Not necessarily an entire new mobile version (which we plan to try sometime down the line) but at least make the view screen work and optimize the pages for better load times.
9/8/2016 Topic: Vote for what to develop next 9/8/2016 Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: Quick question - Would the distribution center be an industry or military logistics structure or something else? Good Question. Structure Logistics for sure. Probably same logistics cost as other structures. Might up the logistics per level or maybe increase the starting logistics amount by another 15 (so you can max out at 120) if we incorporate them. I imagine they can sell one product type at level 1 and +1 type every level up to 10. Their BS power will be bigger than a normal structures at least 2x. Having a level 10 dist. center is some serious product moving around
9/9/2016 Topic: Vote for what to develop next 9/8/2016 Doctor Dread Administrator	Rujholla wrote: Oh man please don't so severely limit how many items a distribution center can sell. And having them count against logistics cap -- it would be better to go back to having a bunch of transports. We could start them at level 1 with say 6 types to sell at once +1 per level they can max at level 10 with 15 types and a lot of BS power per. I can't imagine anyone needing a level 10 dist center unless the city is massive and you're into a dozen products
9/9/2016 Topic: Vote for what to develop next 9/8/2016 Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: Lets see... Expensive Jewelry Personal Droids Cyber ware Basic woods Basic chemicals Industrial chemicals Wheat Coffee Basic metals Precious metals Radioactive metals Rare Minerals Exotic chemicals Exotic metals.... Ok that's 14 but I do sometimes sell intermediate products. Now all I need is a HUGE city in Gulyaev ;p You research points much be all over the place =) On second thought there is a problem with starting a distribution center at 6 slots then going +1 per level, it would be better to make more of them as opposed to leveling them up. Need to make the increase at least the same as the starting number. Might have to start with 1 then go something like 1,3,5,8,12,16, 20, 25, 35, 50. or maybe 5,10,15,20,25,30,25,40,45,50.
9/10/2016 Topic: Vote for what to develop next 9/8/2016 Doctor Dread Administrator	Rujholla wrote: If it uses logistic points at all -- it is going to be easier to just have a lvl 1 or 2 transport sitting in the city per item you are selling with orders to pick up one turn and sell the next a certain amount. Depending on how much you are selling of the item. It is much easier to spare the 1 or 2 points military than logistic points. It has to cost something logistically or you can put one in every city in the game. I thought the whole point of a distribution center was so you wouldn't have to have a transport or ship sitting around selling products, they cost logistics also. For the 1-2 points of logistics you can have a structure that can sell several different products at once at a steady rate that won't drop the price if you wanted. We can make the structure have the ability to scale its selling based on the cities volume and also not sell down to a certain amount so your factories can use some of the components. The only alternative I can think of is to make "distribution" it's own logistics stat just for these structures but that seems a little crazy when it can just be another structure. I do have this idea of making the Corp HQ points you spend on product efficiency can also be used to up your logistics caps. So if you wanted to be a heavy military guy you can move your corp towards that or a purely industrial guy you can move your points towards that also. At that point we might as well make all your logistics stats be based on CorpHQ points.
9/10/2016 Topic: Cost of structures which are not under production Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: Ok - not a bug as in the code is doing what it is supposed to - but it is a bug in so far as it is an odd behaviour. If I have a structure which is not producing anything because I do not have materials for it - my cost is 0 If however I take the same structure and set it to actually halt production - I pay 10% of base production costs... Should it not be 0 in both cases? Well, that's a good find =) I'll look at it
9/10/2016 Topic: Vote for what to develop next 9/8/2016 Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: Honestly it might simply be easier if structures got a second buy/sell slot at a certain point - i.e. once you get a lvl 6 structure you get a second buy/sell slot (maybe this should be limited to second and third tier structures?) I understand that there needs to be a practical limitation in terms of logistics points on these distribution systems but I cannot think of any instance where such a limitation would make it worthwhile over buidling another production facility. I have to say I don't really have problems selling stuff - my main problem is getting stuff to a market to actually sell, that's the challenge! One of the tricks to the game seems to be NOT to produce as much as you can but rather make sure you can move everything you are making =) It seems a distribution center at even low level would be well worth the logistics if you are having the problem of 10 different transports trying to dump onto a single city we can make them more or less powerful until they are worthwhile.
9/11/2016 Topic: About combat... Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: I noticed that the bottom left quadrant of the combat matrix is empty... This is odd, I am assuming that stationary units were not meant to fight stationary units, however what about this situation: Joe and I are best buddies. We work together and decide to each put up a missile turret to defend a key location we are both using. However, we fall apart and start to fight... does this mean that those missile turrets, even if they are in the exact same location, cannot fight each other? (For the record - my missile tower is ALWAYS bigger, better, shinier and with more pointy missiles, so don't anyone get odd ideas here...) As a rule, Defenses cannot engage each other. They are only on the defending side, never on the attacking side, If you both attacked eachother there would be one round of combat where youa re the attacker and another round where he is the attacker,. There is sort of a issue with defenses not being able to "guard" an area or corporation even though the terran federation units do it. The guarding defenses thing is probably going to go away even on the terran fed side. Defenses are very cheap and powerful compared to their normal unit counterparts even though they cannot move you can potentially use them to "attack" anyone who tries to put down in a city of yours
9/11/2016 Topic: Strange behaviour in Emperor elections Doctor Dread Administrator	I saw this ac ouple days ago on the last election, and I'm already working on a fix. If you vote for Machina on ANY of those it will be a vote for Machina. But if this vote is up I want to try to implement the fix
9/11/2016 Topic: [UI/reporting/QoL] Cities, accounting, vehicles Doctor Dread Administrator	1) Sure, the number wasn't displayed because it was changing and it is hard coded somewhere, the guide can't call it from the database. It is set at 500 right now and it checks every 100 turns. I'm open to ideas as to where to display it outside the guide. Perhaps any location hat has industry but no city yet, a little notes that describes it will spawn a city at 500. Maybe on the overview tab? 2) Displaying huge pages worth of grid data becomes a little bandwidth intensive but we can make a paging system. We can perhaps allow the buy/sell to filter to a specific unit or a specific city. That should be more helpful in figuring out what's going on, especially if you can just click on their names on the grid. Anything more complicated than that we canmake a report for in the Corporate >> Reporting section, a list of every unit followed by a list of all his transfers 3) Travel time is a little tricky with complicated list of orders with loops, but its on the drawing board =)
9/12/2016 Topic: Founder List and Frames Doctor Dread Administrator	We have put in a Founders List with the names of everyone who help crowdfund the project. It's under Development Tab >> Founders List. Ordered by pledge level and then backer number. Founders List We also worked on the "frames" that go around your player/corp logo in game. If you backed the project you should see a frame around your logo. The different levels look like this: We're going on vacation for a few days with the family this week so we're not going to make any major updates to the game that might break it until next week. Hopefully our artist can start working on the unit models this week also.
9/12/2016 Topic: [UI/reporting/QoL] Cities, accounting, vehicles Doctor Dread Administrator	Vulpex wrote: I think for some of these things we (as a community) may need to start working on a wiki - I was very much aware that 500 is the limit needed to create a new city for instance... Right now its a little early for a Wiki, these things might change. The 500 industry was arbitrary and with so many cities popping up that not many people are even selling to we might reconsider how and when new cities are created. We've been trying to put more and more into the guide and we want to eventually have little help icons next to things in the interface that will take you straight to it in the guide. The guide has changed more than once or twice as things have changed so we don't like updating the guide very often =)
9/12/2016 Topic: Reducing Crops and Pastures to 5 Products each Doctor Dread Administrator	We're considering removing half the products under farms and Ranches so they will only have 5 products each. We're realizing that there aren't nearly enough farms and pastures on earth to supply 20 products to the entire Sol system. You can actually see the numbers on that. If you zoom out to the entire system and go to the demand tab then drill down to Raw Materials you can see the total Volume for Crops and Meats. In Sol its about 1.2 million right now. Everything else is around 300-400k. The Demand goes up 0.1% a turn so you would have to supply 120k units of meats/crops a turn just to make the demand stabilize. In other systems that might probably won't have a an earth like planet to even supply that much, it can become a serious bottleneck. The problem is that you can only get 1000 units at out of single resource location before overcrowding kicks in, the higher value ones make it cheaper but hit overcrowd faster. There are only about 75 resource locations for food combined, and that's after we converted some. You would have to run every resource at about 50% overcrowd and distribute it perfectly just to get the MINIMUM demand supplied. On one hand there are a lot of cities in Sol, Maybe too many and we should reduce them again but this problem is really only for the foodstuffs and not the other resources. Increasing the number of fields and pastures on Earth and sprinkling some on other planet types can bring it closer but we would need 1.5 times as many just to get to a minimum. This isn't a problem with the other resources because they all can only mine 1-3 products per resource location but the farms and pastures are 10. we think that if we knocked it down to 5 each it would bring it in line with the others while still being a more versatile resource in exchange for the products not being able to be used as components in anything else. We would run a script against the database that would take any existing orders and products for the products we are removing and change them to be one of the others (Corn becomes wheat etc..) Is there going to be a riot of farmers backlashing against this idea? =)
9/15/2016 Topic: Overcrowding bug Doctor Dread Administrator	ChaChaCharms wrote: Perhaps it requires time for news to travel before the effects are no longer there (perhaps a set amount of turns?) You salvaged the big one but the overcrowding is still the same? I think the salvaging isn't redoing the overcrowding stats. I'm on vacation and I can't look into it but I think you can force a reset of overcrowding if you make a different kind of change to production such as change your rate or resource type being produced and set it back. That should work.
9/15/2016 Topic: MetaPhysics and Dimensional Artifact Effects in Doctor Dread Administrator	There's only so much can do when it co.es to ship upgrades. I do t want to combine e x number of artifacts for some kind of super effect but maybe combine them for a higher tier one as long as it's less efficient t then just producing the big one. I do have an idea to make super worm holes or events that require you to deploy multiple artifacts in certain locations .
9/18/2016 Topic: Artifacts completing too fast Doctor Dread Administrator	ChaChaCharms wrote: Wait so you were able to complete an artifact before it actually should have been completed? I haven't been able to reproduce exactly what he has done. If you are producing a big artifact and get 90k into 150k total and then switch to a smaller artifact that takes only 20k to produce it will make that smaller artifact and decrement 20k from the progress bar. It will actually make 4 of them in a row until the progress bar drops down below 20k . That is by design. He is saying that he changed to a smaller artifact and it still produced the bigger one. That is a bug but I don't' know how he did it yet =)
9/18/2016 Topic: Overcrowding bug Doctor Dread Administrator	ChaChaCharms wrote: Please let me know if that will happen, the reset if changing the artifact. Changing your artifact production or rate will not cause you to lose any progress even if you downgrade to a smaller artifact, it will make it immediately if it has enough on the progress bar and keep the rest for another if it still has enough etc. I haven't looked into the salvaging problem yet
9/18/2016 Topic: Back from Vacation! Did Some bug fixes anyway! Doctor Dread Administrator	Back from 3 days at Disneyland with the family, now I'm ready for a vacation!.... Added commas to the credit amounts for contracts Changed Corporation search to default by city and have a useful search feature When you didn't have enough components to run your factory it was charging you zero to run it, It should be your halted production cost now Hopefully fixed a bug where salvaging or destroying a structure wouldn't recalculate the overcrowding percentage at the location. You may see a "Game Turn is changing" screen now if you try to access a page while the turn is flipping. Fixed a major bug with artifacts that allowed you to switch to a high level artifact and get if for the low level artifact production cost. Related to artifact bug - All research facilities were being considered as "Halted Production" no matter what. That ahs been fixed and you should see a bump in your cost for those doing artifacts. Also, when switching artifact types there is a turn delay before production will continue now. Going to work on A distribution Center structure and saving off Order Lists this coming week
9/18/2016 Topic: Artifacts completing too fast Doctor Dread Administrator	ThePor wrote: At about 70k towards A5 Dimensional changed to A1 Geotechnical and now after 1 turn I have a A5 Dimensional for a low price of 20k artifacts. And another one. edited by ThePor on 9/18/2016 Did the same with AX MetaPhysics and it still gave me the AX instead of A1 Geotechnical. I have no idea why you were unable to reproduce it, I managed to do it 3 times. edited by ThePor on 9/18/2016 Found the problem and It should be corrected. There is also a turn delay when switching artifact types now. Posted details in Development forum post
9/19/2016 Topic: Problem with trading Doctor Dread Administrator	Rujholla wrote: Sorry that was my post ... I took too long to hit send. I guess it logged me out. It hasn't been added yet but since there is a problem on Mars right now, from that one Corp that got upset and left(?), I'll try working on it tonight. It will liquidate Corps that haven't logged in for a while which will remove all their structures and assets. Probably a 2 weeks with no login check.

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