Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As a wormholer, I do a lot of PI. One thing I've noticed in the course of doing it is that almost invariably PI setups have hundreds of excess CPU and a dearth of PG. This seems like something that has an easy solution: Give PI users the ability to make power plants. They'd be PI buildings that when placed, remove a certain amount of CPU and add a certain amount of PG. I'm not sure what numbers would make sense, but it would help boost production of PI goods and make it less of a headache.

If anyone's worried about it being imbalanced, well, that'd be up to CCP to decide. A possibility for balancing is making Power Plants consume certain PI products, such as Enriched Uranium, Biofuels, or Synthetic Oil. Another possibility is that they need to be linked to whatever they would be powering - you could send power directly to a PI installation or to the Command Center's pool, possibly with a reduced efficiency when pooling it at the CC - that is, the Plant would output X power when connected directly to an installation but when connected to the CC, it'd add ~80% of that number to the CC's PG.

Hah, thanks. It's one of those fairly minor things, y'know?

I very much DISLIKE this idea.

It adds bloat to the game (and uses up coding time), requires even MORE clicking for PI not less, and doesn't solve anything at all, nor add anything useful. In fact, it potentially causes balancing issues for POS's.



The entire thread is based on the premise that CPU and powergrid should, for some reason, both be maxed out at about the same rate. This is a false assumption. The only reason CPU exists as a limitation at all is so that people will have a reasonable limit to the number of processing facilities they can build if they make a world that is purely devoted to processing facilities.

Aside from that, just ignore CPU. It's not relevant to you if you run a planet that both gathers and processes materials at once. Pretend that powergrid, for your purposes, IS the only restriction. Now, all of the sudden, the reason for this thread existing disappears...

In short, there is no issue here, because powergrid and CPU being equally used is not a goal that we have any good reason to pursue.

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And regardless, if you changed it anyway by creating these powerplants, it would NOT even have the effect you desire. You seem to think that what will happen is that you will get to make more finished goods, and thus make that many more profits in less time. But in fact, when you raise the supply and do not change demand, the prices of each finished goods item would simply go down. So you'd have to do more hauling runs to make the same profits.

This is complicated by the fact that customs taxes are static and would now eat up an effectively larger portion of your revenue.

Complicated further by the fact that people who own their own customs stations don't have that tax concern.

And the lowering cost of fuel goods (currently the most highly traded, highest price PI stuff) would imbalance the intended balance of POSs, making them overly easy to maintain.

Overall: Messy, unpredictable, would make PI even more annoying and not any more significantly profitable, and possibly unbalancing.