Bugs and Suggestions

[MTKnife]

First, two grammar/spelling bugs:

The ban rumor (I think--it could be a similar rumor) text should say "affecting" rather than "effecting".

The merchants in deep space should be exploiting a "populace", not a "populous" (though either way, I still don't know what exactly this means).

Finally, some observations about missions:

I've noticed that if there are two or more missions that take place on a given planet, you have to perform them in the order they appear on the Contracts screen. This arguably makes sense if they occur in the same location (like the Palace), since otherwise you'd need an extra screen to ask the player which to do first, but there's no real reason to prevent me from doing a Spice Hall mission before a Palace mission, for example--and this function would be very useful for making sure a mission that's already expired is done first (that goes double for the maddening occasions on which I can't perform a mission in the Wild Zone because there's another one waiting in the queue on the same planet in the Urban Zone). Right now, if you click on the location for a mission when there's another at the top of a queue in another location on the planet, you get the normal screen for that location.

Also, once you perform a mission in a zone, why not leave you in that zone in case you want to do anything else, instead of kicking you back into orbit? I'm not sure if this extra step takes extra game time (since game time, the last time I looked, is not documented at all), but it's at the very least inconvenient.

Oh, and could we have some documentation of how long various things take? It's annoying having missions expire because things took too long when you didn't have any idea how long they would take in the first place.

[spike]

A good example of this is getting healed at the Doctor. It can take many weeks, invalidating Contracts or other things. There is no warning ahead of time about how long it's going to take. There should be an option to get an estimate of how long it will take, and come back later if it's inconvenient.

[MTKnife]

Heck, when you get imprisoned, it doesn't even tell you how long you were in for--though I've noticed it's not that long, since most of my contracts are still good when I get out.

[jerry]

I agree that kicking you in orbit after completing mission is not helpful, you should stay on planet, at least after the delivery type mission. If you are hunting the guy hidden at a spice hall - it's obvious that after battle you should end up in space, but if you're delivering message to someone in the bar...
It would also be great if you could choose which mission you want to finish in the same location, for example by status-contracts-"go to" button?

Mar 14, 2011 15:48:17 GMT -5 MTKnife said:

could we have some documentation of how long various things take? It's annoying having missions expire because things took too long when you didn't have any idea how long they would take in the first place.

A year has 51 weeks, so 57.1 decodes as a 1st week of 57th year.
When you browse through contracts, you can see the current date in upper-left corner, the distance needed to travel (for example 10 AU) and a maximum date it has to be finished (let's say 57.30)
In this example, you have to travel 10 AU in 29 weeks, which gives you some space for wandering, but not much.
Here's the time use per action (to my experience):
- travelling 1AU (green or red space) - 1 week
- patrolling, blockading, surveillance - 1 week
- entering urban/wild zone - 1 week
- upgrading ship - 3-4 weeks
- healing - 4 weeks per wound
- exploring/harvesting - 9 weeks
- prison - random number, perhaps from 25 weeks up to... 100, half a year up to 2 years? dunno (I've tested 30-80 weeks, but haven't done much testing)
- repairing destroyed engines in space after battle - haven't tested
- repairing broken hull in space after battle - haven't tested
- escaping in a shuttle after lost battle - haven't tested
- making repairs in repair camp - haven't tested

I think that's all actions that will use time.
I hope this will help you to avoid contracts to expire and generally avoid time burn.
Time burn is bad, makes universe a tougher place to live (stronger enemies, higher chance of encountering aliens).

PS. In my opinion such things should not be in a general game guide, it might scare away new players "oh my! this game is so complicated!". However - an advanced player guide would be wellcome. But will you write it? Personally, I prefer Cory to make new features in the game or remove bugs and not to waste time on better manual.
If you need help - that's what the forum is for

[spike]

Even if you can check the time remaining on contracts, you still have no way of finding out how long you were incarcerated, except maybe by quitting and going to the Ship's Log in the main pre-game menu.

I don't totally agree about the manual, I think a good manual is important to encourage more players to play, and keep playing. Cory's time is limited and probably its right that he prioritises his time on coding. It's just a shame there is not someone else to keep the manual up to date. Searching this forum is pretty hard work (depending what you are looking for) and a lot of players might just give up. I think most people can read a manual if it's properly organised into "Overview" vs "Detail".

What might be best is a player-maintained wiki, maintained by the knowledgeable people on this forum - taking workload off the devs, and encouraging and assisting new players. The forum certainly does help players, but a wiki manual would be an extra help.

A few more things that take time:

Round of Spice and Entertaining: this sometimes, but not always, advances the calendar. I would guess that it takes a period of time, but less than a week (a day?), to do these activities.

I had no idea Exploring took so long (9 weeks). That makes Exploring highly incompatible with running Missions I guess!

[Cory Trese]

Exploration takes a variable amount of time. Almost everything does.

Dr. K has been working on a brand new manual for everyone to enjoy =)

[Cory Trese]

Fixing this Wiki thing is on my list but they're very annoying to configure (and I'm actually pretty good at this stuff.)

now ... back to coding ... oh well, back to coding! =)

---

About Prison: you can check how many weeks in the ship's log. There is no need to return to the main menu, the button is in the Status window under "Status >Ship >Ship's Log"

There you will see this message:
public static final String DEFEAT_PRISON = "Captured by vile members of the %s Faction, I have been convicted of Crimes and sentenced to %d weeks on board a Prison Cruiser.";

---

spike: my priorities are coding, you are correct. i'm trying to find ways to better allocate my time to assist new players, the communitarian and everything about ST RPG.

jerry: thank you for the post.

MTKnife: Times are somewhat variable, but jerry provides a good list.

[ehkamp]

Today as of noon today (CDT), the draft of the updated Player's Guide hit 110 pages. Yep, I'm adding a bunch of content.

But don't freak out! The final version won't be that long. The draft includes 248 footnotes (that take-up a bunch of space) -- one for every fact I need to check or another "note to self" -- which will all be eliminated in the final version. (In theory at least!) And it's not really as long as it seems; the tables & images take up oodles of space.

I have tried to be mindful of the "too short for the medium-to-experienced player" vs "too long/overwhelming for the first-time-to-beginning player" conundrum. In an attempt to address this, the first chapter (Introduction, original title eh!) is aimed at the beginning player is VERY elementary (e.g., how to create a New Captain and make the ship move). As the Guide progresses, it gets progressively more detailed and less nub-friendly.

But I'm not convinced that this is necessarily the right approach. I'm open to ideas. I've even thought about creating two Guides: a short, elementary one for beginners and the long, detailed version for more advanced players. But I'm not ready to make that time commitment yet.

[ehkamp]

It has always been my plan to put my updates/additions to the Player's Guide onto the player-maintained Wiki. But they need some polish first.

With that in mind, within the next week, I'd love some of the Forum Members (new AND experienced players) to serve as editors/reviewers.

After staring at it for the last two weeks, it's all starting to run together in my head. I need fresh eyes (& brains!) to point out factual errors, forgotten topics, misspelled, grammatically incorrect, poorly organized, badly written, too detailed, not detailed enough, ugly formatting, or anything else that occurs to you.

Any volunteers??

[jerry]

ehkamp I'll gladly help. However I'm not a natural english speaker, so my editing might need some more editing/polishing, although I hope that not much
I can do spellchecking for typos, content/fact check, "fresh" look and new ideas.

[slayernz]

Hey Ehkamp, I'd love to help out. I am definitely keen to help with polish. Lemme know when you are in a position to send something out

[Cory Trese]

omg omg omg omg omg EHKAMP where did you come from, Thulun Prime?

you keep better records than all the big hats in Rychart syndicate COMBINED =)

[PS: This document is amazin' ]

[spike]

Stuff that takes no time at all (but probably should take time:

-Upgrades
-Repairs & Refits

(Hmm, these should probably be about the most time-consuming things you could do in an Urban Zone)

-Buying/Selling Cargo (good haggling takes time!)
-Loading/Unloading Cargo/Water/Supplies
-Recruiting Crew

[jerry]

spike Remember that we are talking about a one week unit of time.
Haggling could take couple hours at maximum and half day of loading dozen tons of cargo, it's one standard cargo container after all.

Everytime I remembered to check - upgrading took time, I've seen 4 weeks, but it might differ a little. So one month at a dry dock sounds reasonable.

repairs/recruiting... sometimes I was very short on time with damaged sails and low on water or missing few crew members. And I noticed that it took me one week for docking and sometimes another one week for repairing/recruiting/buying supplies, not sure which exactly.

What bugs me is that sometimes I have couple encounters in a row (like 3 or 4) and each encounters takes one week. IMHO encounters should not take time at all (maybe few hours, but not one week). So travelling one AU, regardless of the number of encounters, should always take one week.

[spike]

agree re 1 AU taking 1 week regardless of encounters

on the other hand, using Stealth to avoid encounters might add to your travel time

not sure about the point about 1 week being the minimum time unit. Round of Spice either takes less than a week (eg a day), or it takes a random number of weeks that is usually 0, sometimes 1. It seems more likely that it's taking an amount of time that's less than a week.

some things that take time, that shouldn't take time:

moving back to an Urban Zone / Wild Zone, after being bumped out of there by the game in order to save state to the game database (e.g. after completion of a Contract that takes place entirely in the Urban Zone / Wild Zone)