published on January 23, 2023 in devlog
Fabian discusses the brand new "building repair assistant" and Michi tackles some issues based on your feedback.
Michi (molp)
This week, it was time to incorporate some feedback we received about the faction contracts. There are two issues we want to solve: pirating faction shipments and providing better provisioning contracts.
Let's start with the faction shipment pirating. Just like any other shipment contract, a faction shipment contract can be breached, at least if it has a deadline. A malicious player could take the shipment, wait out the deadline and be left with the shipment contents. Of course some players tried that out and were curious what would happen. To their surprise the shipments often contained large amounts of prefabs, often worth many times the payment of the contract. We received multiple reports from players that this is being abused and players pirate these shipments to sell off the contents. This is not how the faction contracts are supposed to work and the fact that the shipments' contents are worth that much is an oversight on our end. We reduced the value of the shipments in order to make faction shipment piracy not the meta game for new players. This change will be deployed within the next few days.
A faction provisioning contract works like this: The player provides some commodity, the faction picks it up, the player gets paid. The commodity in question is currently being determined by a random selection. Especially for (very) new players that poses the problem, that they might have to acquire a commodity that they haven't heard of before, let alone have ready at their base. Buying that commodity might overwhelm them or make the contract less or even not profitable at all. In order to remedy this, we made the random selection of a commodity more player specific by choosing randomly from the last x produced commodities at the base in question. After deploying this change to the test server and gathering feedback it is clear that we should find a solution that lies between the two selection processes. A side effect of the random selection is that it induces a little demand for rare commodities. So we are currently thinking of mixing the two random choices, more based on actual production for the new players and more randomly for the more experienced ones.
Fabian (Counterpoint)
Besides updating several design documents for future endeavors, I got around to implementing another quality-of-life feature for PRO-license players last week. The building repair assistant (BRA) will allow you to repair multiple buildings at once! You simply select one of your bases and specify a "minimum building condition". Any building at or below that condition will be included in the repairs. You get a preview of all the buildings and the required sum of repair materials. If there are enough resources present in your base storage, a single "repair" click will immediately repair all the displayed buildings. Especially for PRO users who often have many bases to manage, this should save quite a bit of time!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!