Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Just caught up with this topic and my basic feeling is ...

Do it.

This is what PI should have been about from the beginning.

CSM please put this in front for the CCP management and get a team assigned to making this happen.

Firstly... wow. Just wow. Despite making most of my ISK off PI, I did not see this thread until you linked it in the Assembly Hall, since I don't follow Features & Ideas. I look forward to further iteration of this concept with interest!

That said, in reading over all of this, I did come up with quite a few ideas and comments, and thus have formulated a rather lengthy reply... which I've broken down into multiple posts, for convenience.

Relevant to the Industrial side... mining planets for Ice is definitely a worthwhile idea, and is very much supported! Of course, Ice is huge. What kind of cycle time are we talking, here? Even your proposed corporate hangars can't hold all that much of it.

Speaking of those hangars, storage facilities that are actually useful are a major plus; it would save huge amounts of time if you could simply pile lots of resources into a warehouse and let your factories run, rather then having to fly in twice daily to restock your factories. That said, for this to be really useful, there should definitely be some way of streamlining transfers between your ship in orbit and the warehouses on the ground; it'd be really obnoxious to have to transfer everything from your ship, to a hangar in the customs office, to the storage facilities at the starport, to the warehouse... and then back again once it's been processed by your facilities on the ground. It would still be an improvement over having to make the existing runs as frequently as is presently required... but it's less good then it could be, and more clicking for the sake of clicking isn't necessary, here, not when there's so many other awesome things you could be doing with this system.

Similarly, it'd be nice if the click burden of changing a planet-full of Advanced Industrial Facilities to use a different schematic could be reduced. At present, you need to individually click into each facility, scroll through a menu each time, route the new good to the launchpad, and then route each of the new resources individually back to each factory. That's bad design, really; it should be possible to simply select all the factories, tell them all at once to change schematics, all at once to route their products to the launchpad, and all at once to route their ingredients from the launchpad. Or, better yet, routing to/from a warehouse.

That said, I don't think it's very appropriate for PI structures to exactly duplicate the functionality of station/POS-side manufacturing and research slots. Doing so would be a major disincentive to the use of POS's and Outposts, and there's no reason to arbitrarily wreck their functionality by introducing a replacement, even if it is a 'less efficient' replacement. On the other hand... planetary research facilities that can produce Datacores? Sure, that's a new feature, and would totally be worth including in the game, as opposed to the current, clunky system of running through research agents. Provided that it had similar requirements in terms of player skills, and that it in some way could scale to the skill levels possessed by the players in question, that would work just fine, especially for players not all that interested in PI that want slow, easy ISK. This would, of course, probably destroy the Datacore market, so to prevent it from being a massacre, I'd be inclined to recommend some sort of resource consumption to keep the research facilities running, thereby setting a base price to the value of the cores. Off the top of my head, I recommend Heavy Water, since it's already the 'CPU' ice resource (thus making it thematic for any place requiring lots of computing power), and it's highly under-used, compared with it's cousin Liquid Ozone... and will only become more common, as planetary ice mines get going.

Relevant to the planets themselves... not all planets are created equal. Individual planets, even within a given type, should have very different statistics creating environments more or less amenable to human life. This will affect the population growth/death/migration rates, as well as the maintenance costs of everything you're running. There are ways to mitigate the impact of all this... Barren worlds, for instance, are much more habitable once you're put up radiation shields and excavated underground living spaces... and having the appropriate sorts of extra life-support facilities on-hand will serve to mitigate the environmental costs for the cities they support. If that's not enough for you, there's always terraforming... but it's not especially feasible, or profitable, to expect a gas giant to just randomly become some other kind of world; you have to work with what you're given. Terraforming is a long-term investment, where you pay lots of money and resources to slowly change the planet's statistics in a positive way (ISK sink writ large). The faster you're pushing things, and the further beyond base conditions you're trying to change the planet, the more expensive it gets. This isn't something you can accomplish in mere months; it should take years to actually change a planet from one type to another, if such is possible at all. If you're well-organized in your investing, though, and have participation from all parties involved, you can certainly change a given planet for the better, shaving off some of the more extreme edges of it's bad features, making for less maintenance costs and more profit.

That said, doing terrible things to a world, like heavy orbital bombardment with Doomsday superweapons and such, would (though militarily effective) be bad for the long-term profitability of a world, effectively un-terraforming it to a certain degree. There may be other ways to sabotage a world... say, having a Stealth Bomber or similar vessel loaded with either Viral Agents (or, more likely, a Tailored Bioweapon derived from such products) or just old-fashioned nukes bomb the world. It should be possible to defend against such hit-and-run attacks, but for ideal defensive measures to require some advanced systems in place. Of course, nuking a world in the middle of a fight is easier then nuking one that's not under threat, since there'll be nothing else for the land-based defense systems to shoot at, if you're the only one attacking. And a solo bombing run is a tricky thing for your bomber to pull off, if you're alone in hostile space, since you'll have to drop down into the atmosphere and drop your cloak for a while to pull it off...

Relevant to cities, and to military development... I agree with what you're saying about the Civilian/Industrial difference. Ideally, you'll want cities to be a cooperative effort, with the civilian and industrial players sharing resources and working together. That said, Military facilities seem orthogonal to all that. Both the Civilian and the Industrial players will have an interest in defending their properties, and even if they are integrated into cities and sharing resources, both have a stake in any battles that arise, and both should have the opportunity to contribute to the defense. I would recommend that Military command centers be entirely separate from the Civilian/Industrial networks. Anyone who has any of the other types of command centers active should also be able to drop a Military command center, and add as many defenses as they feel the need to add, maintaining them to whatever degree their paranoia and-or good sense demand. Maybe this means that one person will go overboard and build a level-5 Military Command Center, with full planetary shields and anti-orbital guns and all sorts of hardware, while everyone else huddles in the shadow of his paranoia... or perhaps, there'll be a defense composed of a variety of independent operators, aligned in a loose coalition to resist outside influence, and which might end up going belly-up if one guy decides to screw over his neighbors, drop out of the coalition, and hire mercs to claim the rest. All kinds of interesting things might happen here... but they won't be nearly as interesting if everyone on the planet has to choose between ISK making and proper defenses.

Also... you mentioned that "planet types will have no effect on Military networks". That seems backwards to me... it should be a very different experience operating on a temperate planet, which is totally habitable and livable without any special equipment, then on a plasma world, where the atmosphere is a horrible deathscape of flaming electric doom... not to mention a Gas Giant, where the players aren't so much attacking individual buildings as they are mounting boarding actions against hostile space stations. This is, of course, more relevant to the Dust players then the Eve players, but I definitely think that there should be some notable differences in what structures are used, and which are more or less effective, since the terrain does very much differ.

Thanks for the comments. I'm just gonna quote that otherwise we'll be here for life.

1) Ice mines were a late addition to a previous draft. Their ingame implications for PI networks, storage and logistics were not properly considered. We'll have to increase the hanger sizes and determine the effect on link capacity. I was contemplating 1 hour cycles for the building with 1-2 blocks yield per cycle.

4 types of ice mine:

Amarr -> Amarr Ice -> consumes slaves (produced as byproduct to specialized Amarrian civilian PI buildings)
Gallente -> Gallente Ice -> consumes data cores for mining drones (can be introduced as a new PI refined commodity, or as a new data core type)
Caldari -> Caldari Ice -> consumes homeless (produced by all civilian networks if population count exceeds housing capacity)
Minmatar -> Minmatar Ice -> consumes mining equipment (can be introduced as a new PI refined commodity)

2) I'm down with a "select all factories" & "route all factories" button(s). Then again, I'm fine with it the way it is now.

3) PI mimicking POS and outpost functionality -> I think its fine to allow this. All the services found on outposts, were once on planets. It won't kill the value of outposts or towers, since the PI buildings will perform slower than outpost and POS buildings. It will just allow more people to setup slots and not have to wait for an outpost or pay hundreds of millions for a tower. The same cannot be said about Moon Interaction, were we aim to completely eradicate POS based moon mining.

4) Datacores will have material requirements for manufacturing. I also have ownable agents, so players can purchase their own research agents and set them up in their bars/pleasure hubs. Same applies for normal agents. Players who owned these would get a 5% cut or w/e from the payouts to other players.

5) Civilian Transports. I don't think so. I reckon we should just include a breeding civilian population with each civilian command center. That way once its placed, your population multiplies itself and the pilot who owns the network serves as a "civilian transport". But in terms of a sell-able, movable, exploitable item for ships, populations should never go there. Naturally, wh players do not have connections to developed space, so migration is difficult and or non existent. To this end, we should add some sort of population modifier for 0.0, low sec and hisec space as there is more than enough infrastructure to enable migration.

6) The worker idea stemmed from the populations possibly adding some form of value to industrial and military networks beyond being just tax farms for the owner and helping grind the development index. Sure, automate your buildings, but I think this should be a default option for single network PI. City networks should have their populations do something, so employment seemed a logical option. Even if we eradicate workers entirely and just focus on housing limitations for the population, we'd still end up with homeless individuals once the population exceeds the housing limit.

7) Planetary attributes -> more livable and less livable conditions, by all means throw in that variation and increase the construction and operational costs of buildings on the variations as they go. We could even add pollution and hippy tree hugging consequences depending on the way of life of these cities. Bigger polluters from more industrialized cities will decrease the attractiveness, while more civilian orientated areas do the opposite.

8) Do not confuse terraforming with pollution or cleaning up a planet. Planets go through life cycles, think mars. from temperate, to barren wasteland, to possible ice rock and what have you. Allot of people say sure, increase the suitableness of a planet to attract bigger populations faster. I say change the type completely. Make it a long and expensive process, but make it possible. As the process progresses, increase or decrease the life sustaining attributes accordingly.

9) Doomsdaying worlds should have devastating effects on an environmental level. Cities would still be able to survive with enough military networks and rfed shields covering the entire city.

10) I do not agree with making military PI something that can be spammed like tanks in C&C. That would lead to blobs of defenses. Keep it a PI type or else you'd have 1 single network capable of withstanding 100s of ships. And that's just OP and wrong on so many levels. If the sole military network owner wants to screw over the city, then its no different from a rogue director disbanding an alliance.

11) Bring in varying expense and construction costs for military PI based on the planet type. I'm all for this.

12) Ships at some point should be able to land on the surface. This entails gangs of sub caps can hang around in air above cities in holding patterns, trying to shoot down would be escapees. Gate camps, only not. ;) Slow down the ships by 50% due to air friction, kill warp and mwd, add time dilation due to said friction, and you have enough time to allow dust servers to transmit information between servers. Allow afterburners, but the more speed, the more damage a ship sustains until it pops from friction and metal fatigue. So dust players can shoot at Eve ships if they felt like it, and Eve sub caps could shoot at PI structures. In terms of damage to Dust units, this would be reserved for Supers, Capitals like carriers and dreads.

13) Sub caps should be able to only agress PI in range of Dust fire. Reason, their weapons and ammo charges are too small and would burn up from orbit, like small asteroids. Thus, Caps reign supreme. Caps can shoot with beacons or without, sub caps have to wander in range of Dust + defenses to shoot at PI.

14) Drones. I say sentry drones and smaller from inside the atmosphere, fighters and bombers from orbit.

They will and do



I'd prefer to keep my current profits. I feel you on the RSI comment, even the more PI players with a smoother feel, but tbh the whole current click on all 5 of my factories thing across a gazillion accounts doesn't register on an emotional level as much as the click on each individual extractor out of 40 per network thing did.



Again, PI buildings will be slower. for say, research networks, this will translate into days and weeks of additional delay if your working with items like Capital BPOs etc. If you want those things done in a more timely fashion, then invest in a tower or an outpost if you have the cash. The same will apply to manufacturing, with a severe reduction of slots per building compared to slots per POS module. a tower module will easily have 3 times more slots than a network, while operating 15%-30% faster. If we apply the same logic to ship modules, we pay hundreds of millions for a 3% bonus. That seems out of whack for me.



Not going to argue. And I'm sure we could introduce some sort of mechanism for that. But I don't think this should be the primary population growth mechanic. It should be supplementary based on the attractiveness of the destination.



And if Military PI had its own passive income structures that could offset the expense only angle? Then surely it would render this oversight null and void. It's like hisec towers. You have the defenses, but you keep them offline until needed because they suck up resources and it's pointless to engage a hisec tower without a wardec and a blob of ships. This having been said, I do not believe Military PI, or the means to defend your interests should be a profitable business, when compared to civilian, social or industrial PI.

But a valid point.

Then again, if you ran (project) the numbers, you'll see that even a single civilian network with a large enough tax base could make a profit and carry a single military network with ease within said profit margins. We don't want to create isk supernova waterfall faucets without isk blackholes.

Making military PI profitable would be like making guns on a POS pay you isk if its onlined.

I hear you. Financially speaking, it is kind of a toss-up, but ultimately, I conclude that, since I make as much or more money from PI-related arbitrage as I do from the PI itself, it'd be better to have more people involved in the market then less. And supporting a bad and inconvenient mechanic just because I'm personally willing to put up with it, based on the conclusion that there are other people out there who find it so frustrating they'd rather not bother... yeah, I'd rather be playing a better game, then making more money in a worse one.



'Slower' hardly cuts it. This is a game-changer, and not in a good way. Right now, the easiest way to get extra research/manufacturing slots is to put up a POS, and that's not at all easy. POS's are big, expensive, and high-maintenance. Those maintenance costs can be alleviated by doing PI, and the penultimate products of PI are needed to build more POS.

By creating new ways to get access to Research/Manufacturing slots, 'slower' or 'less efficient' or not, you massively devalue the POS. That, in turn, massively devalues PI. In short, adding Research/Manufacturing capacity to PI will actually decimate PI, at least in it's present 'Industrial' form.

I remain vehemently opposed to this idea. Any other industrial capabilities added to PI should be orthogonal to the existing system, and not at all in direct competition with it. Given that you're already introducing datacore production via groundside research labs, why not add the ability to convert Meta 0 modules into Meta 1-4 modules on the manufacturing side?




So... we agree, then, that Military PI should not be profitable. Since it's something that costs money, then, it's not something that people will want to set up on worlds that they don't have a stake in. Since it's something that, under your current proposal, would interfere with their ability to engage in profitable PI, it's something that would only happen as a 'Planet Tax'... which is a terrible mechanic, and certainly not something you'd want underscoring the whole framework of DUST.

Of course, I totally understand where you're coming from in terms of MCC spam. Just like it wouldn't make sense for people to only involve themselves in the defense of others, it would also be bad if almost everyone who ran any PI at all anywhere had a pile of defensive structures for no reason, just because.

Perhaps a compromise? You don't want people to be able to spam Military PI on all their worlds. You've already introduced a skill that would let people add another 5 worlds worth of PI, for a total of 11. Why not add another PI skill... requiring some non-trivial amount of existing PI skills, I'd advocate at least Interplanetary Consolidation IV and Command Center Upgrades IV... called 'Planetary Defense Command' or some such. Each level of that skill would allow you to build a Military Command Center, for a total of 5 at level V. There could also be another skill called something like 'Planetary Defense Operations' that determines how much your MCC's can be upgraded. Of course, these would be more expensive PI skills, around level 8 or so. Accordingly, since they'd be skills requiring a high level of investment in PI... and then a high level of investment in ISK... for no return but that the worlds you choose to guard become safer... they wouldn't be spammed anywhere near as much as they would if they were 'free' for people to deploy on their own worlds. But that said... since they'd be separate systems, people still could choose to defend their own worlds, without fear of overlap.

That sound better to you?

So why not make the costs of those buildings mirror the costs of current POS modules? They (planetary Installations) will also require an upkeep, it would just not be as expensive as a POS. You'd build the building on a planet for roughly the current Jita prices of the POS counterpart module.

At the end of the day, research and manufacturing on PI worlds is an option that should be open to players. And what changes are coming for modular towers?

Have those been considered or aligned with the effects this suggestion will have on them?

I still propose we allow it.



Would this work the same way the current system works i.e. 1 military command center per planet with a total of 5 command centers (or more if we add an advanced version of the skill to the tree)? Because that doesn't sound like a bad alternative.

Or would you envision this idea with 5 military command centers... per planet...

Because the 5 per planet the player has a civilian/industrial network on is still going to turn military PI into a spamming blob and the costs would mount somewhat.

I can't see the future. I don't know how modular POS's will look if/when they get released. But at present, this would have a destructive effect on the economy. Even so, I'd be inclined to suggest that, if there really needs to be more research/manufacturing slots available, that there be other ways of getting them (moon 'PI'? player-owned deadspace complexes?) that wouldn't invoke the economic destruction caused by mixing it in with existing PI.

Frankly, the issue here is that existing PI is just way too cheap and requires way too little infrastructure to be an appropriate source of slots. If you were to propose a way of getting slots that required about as much resource investment (in terms of consumption of P4 commodities and some kind of PI-based fuel), then I wouldn't have an objection. I don't feel that that way should be planet-based, but if the infrastructure and fuel issues were dealt with, then there wouldn't be huge economic problems associated with it.



Uh... no, 5 MCC's total, like with the current system. In suggesting a compromise, I was proposing something more reasonable then my initial suggestion, not something totally insane. As envisioned, you could have an MCC and a Civilian/Industrial CC of your choice on the same planet... but your total amount of MCCs with maxed skills is 5, while your total amount of Civ/Ind CCs is 11. That make more sense?

1: It is my expectation that, given a high bar to entry (only those who train their PI skills up to fairly high levels may apply), and limited slots available to those who do train the skill, that there would be vastly less MCCs then the other types. That said, testing can determine whether or not this is the case... and, of course, if it was found that the compounded effect of multiple MCCs is too great, it could always be nerfed from the CPU/Powergrid end. If, once everything has been calculated out and laid down, there's too many military facilities out there per planet, just reduce the maximum amount of defensive structures any given MCC can lay down. One way or another, it'll work out.

2: I haven't said as much about the social end of things, because that's a little far off from the rest. That said, if there was a method involving high initial infrastructure costs, plus ongoing maintenance, for some high-investment person like a city executor to slot in a certain amount of research/manufacturing facilities to his city center (rather then any random person just dropping said facilities for a trivial ISK payment), then that would probably work.

I just skimmed through this topic while running incursions but I love the OP already. This is just awesome and I really hope CCP have a good look at it.