Construction mode feedback thread

[Marquesas]

Any means to coordinate would make things much easier: it is too easy for lack of communication to waste everybodys time. Something like spawning with those multi-frequency headsets would be awesome, so that 'departments' of people who want to do the same stuff can create themselves. If you want to go fancy, a captain to be head coordinator. A head id at the start to use the comms console would also be useful, because that's when the most chaos comes out, and a big "team x building y" announcement would clear things up.

OOC is not disabled during construction and IC in OOC is allowed.

Question time

As it stands, a station currently gets built in roughly 6 hours, at which point people sort of wander off and the station dies down, leaving 18 hours of a couple of people futzing around sometimes with a room or something. At this point, I feel that 24 hours is far too much for this round to be able to sustain a constant high population. It is the prevailing popular opinion that starting from scratch and the few first hours of coordination are the best bits.

Proposition: I'd like to condense the gameplay of the game mode into 12 hours instead of 24. Disproportionately with this, events would be scaled back from the current once every 15-30 mins to a more compatible every 12-20 mins model (this is the delay between events -- if a siege lasts for 5 minutes, then the next event is counted from the end of the siege). Difficulty multiplier over time would increase by a factor of 1.67, thus an event would become twice as difficult as it was at minute 0 exactly 6 hours in, instead of the current 10 hours.

Pros:

• Less downtime. The last 12 hours of a construction mode are, according to my down observation, slow, with a few players struggling to battle off an attack force.
  
• More intense gameplay. By the end of what I like to call the first phase we have a functional station, threats would be much more advanced than currently.
  
• More people get a chance at starting from scratch a day. I cannot emphasize enough that this obviously seems to be the most interesting bit for most people and thus it should be encouraged that everyone gets their fair chance to participate in it.

Cons:

• You lose 12 hours. You don't get to play, go to sleep, wake up and check out live if your structures are still intact.
  
• More intense gameplay. You just wish the goddamn martians would stop coming altogether.

My current stance is Yes on this, if anyone has sound counter-arguments, please present them.

[Iatots]

Can we... can we at least get a pen?
For signs outside rooms.
Also a gps.
Also like a sign where the merchant shuttles arrive.

While I agree 24 hours feel like too much for one round I am personally in favour mostly because it would make it easier for me to get in a round at the start. Bumping it up to 18 hours would also give the server a 4 day cycle with shifts starting at midnight, 6 AM, midday and 6PM. It may be a stretch, but people could sleep AND come back to play. Those that have the free time, at least. Also this could backfire as not all starting times would be popular.

Does anyone personally think the mining/debris z-level offers too much in term of tech and equipment?

[Marquesas]

Please note that the round itself cannot be precisely 24 hours due to generation time, setup time, restart time, lag, etc. At this point it seems that an average of 10-15 minutes of delay is present at all times. If we'd agree on 12 hours, I'd set the time to 12 hours and 15 minutes, coupled with the 15 minute delay, the cycle start times would shift by 1 hour every day. For people with mostly static daily routines, it would give them the chance to join at different progress times every day, which might keep it more interesting.

[Cogwerks]

Does anyone personally think the mining/debris z-level offers too much in term of tech and equipment?

That stuff is all out there to provide quiet spaces for people to learn and scheme off-station.

[Iatots]

Does anyone personally think the mining/debris z-level offers too much in term of tech and equipment?

That stuff is all out there to provide quiet spaces for people to learn and scheme off-station.

Yes, which is why I felt it as a flow breaker in a build-a-giant-station-all-together server. It also feels a bit like cheating going there and scanning/looting all that stuff, which for now is somewhat mandatory to take off decently. That's at least how I see it but maybe I am wandering into RP territory.

[Amuys]

Marquesas gave me a scanner during one round, and there were all sorts of weird anomalies relating to atmos.
In many cases, as long as you're on a steel floor, there it always be at room temperature and normal pressure and oxygen. This can be a one floor tile in the middle of space for example, with no air around it. Sometimes there are anomalies where there are pockets of extreme cold and no pressure inside the station. About the only thing consistent was space had no pressure, no gas, and was extremely cold. But the tile next to it could be completely pressurized, oxygenated, and heated for some reason.
One of the weirdest thing I saw was a glass fireplace where the plasma fire inside was always at 20 C, even though it could ignite plasmastone and char just fine.

[Marquesas]

Yes, which is why I felt it as a flow breaker in a build-a-giant-station-all-together server. It also feels a bit like cheating going there and scanning/looting all that stuff, which for now is somewhat mandatory to take off decently. That's at least how I see it but maybe I am wandering into RP territory.

You're absolutely right and I will poll people about this, but I'd like to take this one question at a time.

Atmos issues

As far as I know, an atmos rewrite is currently in progress. Hopefully things like this should be ironed out by it.

[Amuys]

Well as a non bug related suggestion, probably more asteroids closer to the station? It's hard to get back to the station without a pod, and it's easy to run out of air and get lost since the asteroids are at the edge of the map.

[Marquesas]

You could perhaps...
construct
...landmarks that ease your return. That was what the first team to test this under my supervision did and I found it pretty clever.

Also, I'd like to avoid anything getting in the way of expansive construction, that includes asteroids.

[Amuys]

I guess, it just feels more like a rush to get to the mining pods and setup the magnet rather than try and mine the asteroids that are there since they're too much of a hassle to mine with just jetpack and pickaxe.

[UrsulaMejor]

I get tired of the station around the time I go to bed. Usually, after I get off school and come back around the next day I'm just waiting for the round to restart so I can get creative.

Yes to shorter rounds

[DyssalC]

I like the idea of shortening the rounds and making everything more hardcore, but I have to ask if there are more sieges than just ghosts, martians, and the occasional escapees from the local space zoo.

[UrsulaMejor]

A tracking beacon kit for pods and a box of GPSes on the station would be a godsend. I'd say ~10000 is a fair price for a luxury item like the pod warp target and until then the box of GPSes would allow us to easily set up a pseudo-target for manual navigation back to the station.

Being able to set up warp gates late-game like candy when we're rich to have a "mineral magnet" beacon and a "arrivals" beacon also sounds like a really nice thing to have, which is why I suggest a kit and not just starting with one.

[Silvercloud29]

Here is a problem I JUST ran into while spawning late into a round....



So I think the starting shuttle needs a little bit more optimization.... Or we could have more things like this pop up. Open the floor space a bit maybe...

Next thing is, even though I don't mind the shorter rounds, It just feels WAY to swarmed. On the 24 hour cycle I would fight off a army of martians. Take 15 min to kill them all. take 10 min to clean up, 5 min to continue building something... Than drones come in. It's like you can't get anything done in the mid-game after a point, and it gets really, really excessive. However turning down the assault waves would make the round to boring as well... Its just a thought, I have no real suggestion to fix this. It's a balance thing.

I do say, please DON'T remove the debris Z level. It helps us out in the long run especially when it's kinda slow the start and your playing beat the clock before you get shit canned by 40 martians. It's not over powered, at least in my opinion.

Also. Is it possible to get a warp beacon for the arrivals shuttle or one we can order for the station (And only 1)

[DyssalC]

Sometimes mobs spawn on some weird patch of floor someone built somewhere faraway or in a forgotten hallway or maint tunnel. When this happens, they should begin nesting/basing, though it would be more like the wizard's corruption ritual.

Space wasps left idling for too long should have a chance to start building a nest, turning the floors and walls around them into hive overtime and laying eggs, and in order to stop it you have to go in and murder the queen wasp, which spawns in when the hive spreads enough to support eggs.

Martians should begin converting the area around them to flesh ship if left idling too long, and after a while they set up a teleporter that allows them to bring in reinforcements, and the way to stop them from doing so is to smash the teleporter. Of course, it wouldn't really be a teleporter, just a mob spawning system that you can remove by destroying.

Man-Eaters and Killer Tomatoes should start to spread kudzu for their base-type thing. They'd grow move of themselves from the outer-most layer, with a few of them in little pockets around the center, and you have to destroy it all to stop them from spreading/spawning.

This might be a bit much, but keep in mind everybody can respawn in 20 minutes if they die, it'll give more reason to have an armory/order weapons, more reason to have a fully stocked/attended medbay, etc.