Laguna
22 May 2025 15:56
Link
Hi all,
Below are some changes that I believe would benefit the game, but I haven't shared them before because they require significant development time. Some I've been mulling over for a very long time and I just air them out. I don't expect any changes to come on the below, so I won't develop them much, and I understand we aren't in the product life-cycle stage that these could be implemented.
UI & Messaging
It needs to be revamped to be uniform across countries and enterprises and even players. As it stands, it's a mixture of the original UI from the 2000s, the widget from the 2010s and some extra odds and ends. A light and dark modes would be enough.
The main push for this would be to centralise the in-game messages in one place, and lend the UI to a more intuitive way of exploring the game and socializing. Updating the forum would be nice too.
Quality
I'd remove quality altogether from the game. Quality adds an additional dimension to the computing of the trade matching, and players often ask how this works which takes time away from the devs. But my really issue, quality's fatal flaw is that it works against Common Markets. You are better off playing by yourself and with the international market than making a supply network with other players.
If you got rid of quality, imposed a "international market fee" of, say, 10%, and exempted common marker contracts, this would create an incentive to join Common Markets.
Space Trade
This dimension needs a lot more love than I can give it. For now, my drive is just to make it exclusive to trade and make it tick based. In essence, to remove the map element (which is necessary for the war style used in Simcountry), used a set of fixed points to determine how many ticks it takes to travel between them and stick to that. This would remove the need to calculate the coordinates for every ship in transit at every tick, making Space a far more scalable venture. Life Expectancy would be measured in ticks.
Every time I log-in, I think these should change. Now that's off my chest, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Below are some changes that I believe would benefit the game, but I haven't shared them before because they require significant development time. Some I've been mulling over for a very long time and I just air them out. I don't expect any changes to come on the below, so I won't develop them much, and I understand we aren't in the product life-cycle stage that these could be implemented.
UI & Messaging
It needs to be revamped to be uniform across countries and enterprises and even players. As it stands, it's a mixture of the original UI from the 2000s, the widget from the 2010s and some extra odds and ends. A light and dark modes would be enough.
The main push for this would be to centralise the in-game messages in one place, and lend the UI to a more intuitive way of exploring the game and socializing. Updating the forum would be nice too.
Quality
I'd remove quality altogether from the game. Quality adds an additional dimension to the computing of the trade matching, and players often ask how this works which takes time away from the devs. But my really issue, quality's fatal flaw is that it works against Common Markets. You are better off playing by yourself and with the international market than making a supply network with other players.
If you got rid of quality, imposed a "international market fee" of, say, 10%, and exempted common marker contracts, this would create an incentive to join Common Markets.
Space Trade
This dimension needs a lot more love than I can give it. For now, my drive is just to make it exclusive to trade and make it tick based. In essence, to remove the map element (which is necessary for the war style used in Simcountry), used a set of fixed points to determine how many ticks it takes to travel between them and stick to that. This would remove the need to calculate the coordinates for every ship in transit at every tick, making Space a far more scalable venture. Life Expectancy would be measured in ticks.
Every time I log-in, I think these should change. Now that's off my chest, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
