Remove the ship design workshop (aka creative mode).

[Frankiebgg123]

When I first played this game I built my first ship in the middle of space - manually welding beams and bolting everything together. This game has amazing building mechanics that seriously rival Valheim - but no one knows that they are there because the entire building system is replaced with creative mode (ship design workshop) where you build your ship in a CAD program.

As a result, the game had no goals, no challenges, no economy, no progression. Because instead of developing the tools and industry to make large, complicated ships the only goal was to mine ore and then spend it at the CAD program.

It is clear that this was not the original design of the game:

-Thrusters and other components which must slide and bolt together.
-Placing compound objects in your inventory (never seen a game where you can do this).
-Ammo for welding gun/bolt gun.
-Having hand tools at all, really...

All of this stuff makes no sense in Starbase when the entire gameplay loop is to hit rocks and make your ship in CAD. By the way - if you build a ship without spawning it in the ship designer, it will get garbage collected when you log out. To me, the ship designer was an alpha/testing tool that became the whole game's content because factories and other features were never finished.

Anyway, not sure why I wrote this. Like every other sandbox game, the devs are convinced that "PVP will be the content". I assume whoever created all of these impressive building mechanics is long gone. Probably got fired.

 

[Colonkin]

I don't think your proposal is a good idea. There is no problem with the very existence of a CAD editor.
The problem is the instant production of a ship from basic resources. The player bypasses the stage of manufacturing products and components. This eliminates interaction with component manufacturers. This problem can be easily solved.

This is a ban on making drawings from ores. Products only.

Naturally, it is necessary to introduce the option of purchasing components missing from the warehouse on the market. In addition, production time should also greatly depend on the size of the ship (number of products). This would also facilitate unification into large organizations for mass production. At the moment, I regard what SSC provides as an alpha test of the game's capabilities (which is deliberately accelerated). I think it's time to introduce some specializations (equipment, skills or tools) that increase the speed of ore processing / component production / ship production....
When the player is universal, it is no longer an MMO game. There is no incentive to interact. Sincerely.

 

[Askannon]

Making ships from crafted items only works only so long as you have inventory space unless you allow building in stages.
There's also currently the thing about you not being able to make a ship without having the research done for all the parts as you can not really rely on the market to satisfy that need.

The way the SSC currently works is a product of the surrounding game design and that should change before one goes after it, at least in my opinion.

 

[Colonkin]

Making ships from crafted items only works only so long as you have inventory space unless you allow building in stages.
There's also currently the thing about you not being able to make a ship without having the research done for all the parts as you can not really rely on the market to satisfy that need.

The way the SSC currently works is a product of the surrounding game design and that should change before one goes after it, at least in my opinion.

I completely agree. Therefore, I consider the current state of affairs with SSC (ore printing) as a temporary necessity. But when there were 200+ online, almost all the parts were in stock. However, if the market is not launched 100%, everything will remain the same.

 

[ZombieMouse]

A player can spend 100+ hours designing a ship in the SSC. It could take 1000+ hours to build it in-world. The same ship can be lost in seconds.

I'm fine with Starbase being a dangerous place - that is part of the fun. But the ease with which ships are lost means it is seldom worth the effort to build anything serious in-world. I see the tools as being there for repair and salvage, not scratch building.

 

[Colonkin]

This is what the blueprints and the ship market are for. Just like in real life.

To be a good driver or tank driver, you don’t need to build a car or tank yourself.

What is long and tiring for one person is pleasure and an influx of positive emotions for another.
And this is the point that you can quickly lose a well-designed and cheap ship, transfer to another similar one and fly again. At the same time, a huge top ship must be expensive and take a long time to make. It is precisely in this (in limited availability for production) that there is its considerable value.

Naturally, all this needs to be balanced.

I remember my journey in the game. From a simple laboratory worker and the search for the first asteroids to a flight to the center of the ring in one person.
For all this I bought and selected different ships.
In short-range PvP, I always chose a ship that could be restored in one successful voyage. And even if I lost due to inattention, I was never particularly upset. On the contrary, I analyzed the errors to understand what was wrong.
PVP is the same topic. I started looking for it on a ship almost assembled on my knees, which could restore about 10 pieces in one flight to the PVE zone on Magus III. I understood that most likely I would be shot down quickly, but I was angry, boarded a new ship again and flew off to fight. For practice.

Risk and reward.

All virtual and real wars always depend on economics and planning. Any PVP is not just pew pew. It's more about balancing the cost of material and the cost of time.
You can create a mega super ship. And they will simply bombard him with cheap T1 ships. Yes, there will be a lot of them, but the speed of replenishment plays a key role here.

Summary. It is not enough to create a ship with 100+ hours of design and 1000 hours of production. We need to think about whether it’s worth creating it at all? Maybe it's easier to make 20 standard ships? Analyzing this situation is also a game. For leaders of corporations and alliances.