Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Edited by: CCP Greyscale on 03/04/2008 17:52:44
Ok, so we’ve been knocking around a bunch of ideas relating to starbases and so on this week, and one thing that came up as an unnecessary complication of the system is the multiple fuel types needed for each tower.

The Liquid Ozone and Heavy water both serve a distinct purpose, and we need at least one other general fuel type to make the cost/benefit equations work according to the design. There’s no explicit design need though for towers themselves to burn six different fuel types (Racial Isotopes, Enriched Uranium, Mechanical Parts, Coolant, Oxygen and Robotics) at a constant rate.

That said, we don’t want to disrupt the current mechanics too much, or make any radical changes to the principles behind starbase fuelling until we have the opportunity to revisit the broader set of mechanics. We have therefore come up with a proposal to reduce the logistical complexity of actually fuelling towers (starting with opening your fuel storage receptacle and ending with placing the fuel in the fuel bay).

The key point is that we create four racial “fuel pellets”, which replace the isotopes and NPC commodities in the starbase fuel bay. They are manufactured, using blueprints, from the relevant isotope type and NPC commodities (quantities below). You then just pop in Heavy Water, Liquid Ozone and fuel pellets, and the starbase runs as normal.

A requirement of this going in sooner rather than later is that it doesn’t require any changes to the underlying code. One upshot of this is that all starbases have to be migrated across to using fuel pellets rather than commods – if we go ahead with this, you will not be able to fuel towers directly with isotopes and commodities.


Now for the numbers!

One run of the blueprint will need the following materials, and will output 80 fuel pellets:

Isotopes: 452
Enriched Uranium: 4
Oxygen: 28
Mech Parts: 8
Coolant: 4
Robotics: 4

Towers will consume pellets according to the following scheme:

Large: 80/hour
Medium: 40/hour
Small: 20/hour
Large Faction 1: 70/hour
Medium Faction 1: 35/hour
Small Faction 1: 17/hour
Large Faction 2: 60/hour
Medium Faction 2: 30/hour
Small Faction 2: 15/hour

(Faction 1 is Blood et al, Faction 2 is Dark Blood et al)

You’ll notice if you run the math that this results in some towers consuming slightly more fuel per cycle than they do currently; if we’re going to have a single pellet for each isotope we need to either round up or round down due to imperfect scaling between tower types, and rounding down isn’t really something we want to do here. The 80/40/20 progression lets us keep the 4:2:1 ratio while still rounding cleanly with both sov bonuses.

This is something we’re considering purely as a usability boost to make actually fuelling towers less painful, so we’re asking you all whether you think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. It’s not designed to decrease the logistical load at all or to change the major mechanisms of fuelling. Is this something you’d like to see ingame or should we shelve the idea?


As a bonus question, Fuel Pellets or Fuel Bricks?

you do realise that the only changing fuel requirements are ozone and water, yes?