Here are several items for consideration to help make PI a bit easier to do and enjoy more.
Get rid of the floating 3d icons. Its hard to see underneath them to make links. Very annoying feature.
Planetary installations could be saved like a fitting. So they could be dropped on a planet as an object and not have to rebuild them every single time. Big time saver; allow for corp building plans to be shared with members. Saving the routing plans or alternate routing plans would be a huge plus.
Colored or highlighted routing when you click on an installation to better see what is connected to where.
snap to ‘sticky’ edges on installations so you can place them together easily without having to struggle to get the building into the ‘right’ position. would be a big time saver and reduce frustration of base building.
Routing to and from POCOs. It could even be skill enabling x quantity a day.
Red high lighted building when a route is not completed properly. ie a schematic or extraction does not have a destination set. Lost production is never a fun thing because you did not know the routing failed to commit.
Please let em know if you need additional information or examples to illustrate further.
Thanks
Varrek Rexdraco
The holograms may be a pain for players but I’ve been told they are REALLY a pain for bots and I do not expect them to go away.
Anything that reduces player interaction with the feature - making it a more passive activity is likely, and should be a non-starter. Remember - easier for you means easier for everybody which means lower prices for the product!
Routing to POCOs is absolutely a non starter - the need to visit your colonies to export and collect your product is the only element of risk in the system.
If you forget to route your material after moving an extractor - you lose that production. Same as forgetting to load cargo before undocking - mistakes have, and should have consequences.
That said - there are aspects of the user interface that I believe should be improved. The “snap to” for positioning structures I like and I would love a preset for program duration - that slider is truly miserable for those of us who are older and no longer have the fine motor control we took for granted in our youth!
Great rebuttals. PI is a game of balance and fine tuning. Those who are better at it increase their outputs.
The only thing I would like is the option of grouping extractor heads, so that I can reposition multiple heads at one time rather than moving them individually.
The visual route would be nice, rather than just the end percentage bubble.
Add in a feature to zoom in closer to larger planets so that a link on a gas giant isnt 10x as long as a link on a barren planet even though visually they are sitting right next to each other.
I had not considered that the holos would cause an issue for bots. Definitely causing an issue for the humans too.
POCO routing was a reach… Thought i would toss that out there. If you set up as many planets as i have, you wouldn’t mind having a pattern to drop like a fit. just a time saver, avoid an often frustrating part of the game. The sticky edge option 4 would also make that alot less painful. just saying… Thanks for taking the time to consider a few ideas.
Varrek.