Make bases feel more whole (less micromanagement)

Started by snzRoland, July 09, 2020, 12:26:12 AM

snzRoland

First of all, english is a foreign language to me, so sorry for mistakes.

It's a great game. After playing it i was so fascinated that even bought and played your previous game VoidExpanse.
The only thing that made me stop playing Cryo - base micromanagement. Icons on chests is a cool thing, yes, but running from one corner of the base to another to take 5 fibers is very inconvenient.

So my suggestion is:
1. Whole base has shared inventory. It can be auto used when you craft something on the territory of the base. Its capacity depends on the amount of chests built. You can make building every next chest cost x2 resources from previous chest. It will prevent players from building a base that consists only from chests AND will create the need to farm/mine more resources.
2. Whole base has shared crafting bench interface(?). You build weapons bench and chem bench. Now when you are on the territory of the base you can open single craft interface and build anything you want. You can make materials cost of benches grow x2 like with chests. And every next bench decreases crafting time of its recipes by, say, 5%.

Thats all.
No need to run around the base! It takes too much time in late game!
It makes your base "upgradeable". You can "level up" your base (in russian we call it "╨┐╤Ç╨╛╨║╨░╤ç╨║╨░") and feel that is is not just a combination of tables and chests, but a whole thing - YOUR BASE, YOUR HOME with (example) 100 power grid, 4th lvl weapons bench and 10th level storage. Now you can even  have statistics! You can be proud of your base, its now your companion. But now the only thing that makes your base feel like whole is electricity...
By doubling the cost of benches and chests you create condition for farming/mining more. No more chests full of useless resources!

Thank you for your attention)

P.S. You can even make special storage buildings to "hide" some resources when someone is looting your base or to get extra capacity for ores/liquids.



ai_enabled

Hello!

Thank you for your feedback! These improvements are suggested from time to time and we're thinking about it.

The biggest problem preventing us from even experimenting with these ideas is that the game is multiplayerΓÇöunlike a singleplayer game, all the data need to be synchronized over the network. So providing the information (and keeping it up to date) about the content of all the chests and crafting stations in the player's base is a challenge.
While network bandwidth is not a concern for many countries in the world, some countries have a very limited (and expensive) network capacity and we need to keep that in mind (e.g. we're renting only 5 Mbps servers in mainland China and South America, and they are extremely expensive with every extra Mbps to cost 10 USD/month).

Let's see how it goes with the upcoming update (A27) where we've added new features such as structures relocation (https://trello.com/c/n7GPfLNB/79-structure-relocation) or redesigned crafting stations to make them more compact (https://discordapp.com/channels/344332261510086658/496663010551660554/730386141341024256).

Regards!

snzRoland

Quote from: ai_enabled on July 09, 2020, 04:08:21 AM
Hello!

Thank you for your feedback! These improvements are suggested from time to time and we're thinking about it.

The biggest problem preventing us from even experimenting with these ideas is that the game is multiplayerΓÇöunlike a singleplayer game, all the data need to be synchronized over the network. So providing the information (and keeping it up to date) about the content of all the chests and crafting stations in the player's base is a challenge.
While network bandwidth is not a concern for many countries in the world, some countries have a very limited (and expensive) network capacity and we need to keep that in mind (e.g. we're renting only 5 Mbps servers in mainland China and South America, and they are extremely expensive with every extra Mbps to cost 10 USD/month).

Let's see how it goes with the upcoming update (A27) where we've added new features such as structures relocation (https://trello.com/c/n7GPfLNB/79-structure-relocation) or redesigned crafting stations to make them more compact (https://discordapp.com/channels/344332261510086658/496663010551660554/730386141341024256).

Regards!

Really fast answer.
But i have a question.

Now we have 10 chests in the base.
Base 1. Chest 1. Slot 1: stone 200, Slot 2: stone 200, etc
Base 1. Chest 2. Slot 1: Iron ore 200, Slot 2: iron ore 200, etc
Base 1. Chest 3.... etc.
So you have to send to the network: 10 chests * ~24 slots per chest * item_id * item_quantity

Having shared inventory for the base you have to do smth like:
Base 1. Slot 1: stone 2000, Slot 2: iron ore 1988, etc.
And send: num_of_unique_items * item_id * item_quantity

So for me it looks like minimizing the use of network...

ai_enabled

@snzRoland, right, but it's still a ton of data every time you enter the base + "bookkeeping" overhead (to keep everything updated in live). Even with some smart approach with caching the data and applying only delta updates (e.g. when player returning to his/her base after a while, the state is synchronized by applying changes that happened while this player was away), it's still a challenge.
Plus everything is getting way more complicated with armored safes and other structures with limited access (e.g. a room behind a door that cannot be accessed by everyone) so the available item lists might be different for each player.
Unlike a singleplayer game where this feature is straightforward to implement, in our case, it could easily take days or even weeks of our time that we may better spend on something else that is requested by the community or planned in the roadmap.

Regards!