Poll: Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: Player-side (III)

[Wingflier]

The throttle is actually extremely annoying because once both your resources hit 0, it takes a full minute or more for the active Manufactories to finally shut-off.  So you're stuck in this massive resource black hole, which is especially dire in the middle of a battle or in a time where every resource counts.  To fix this you have to manually go into the controls, disable manufactory management, then manually turn everything off.  I probably spend 30 minutes to an hour in a big game just on this task alone, because it tends to happen so often.  It's very frustrating.

[chemical_art]

Manufactures serve like the old energy system did: Pressing the pause button allowed micro to min-max things, at the cost of human time.

Unlike energy, there is no fiddling with balance, it simply needs to be automated.

[ZaneWolfe]

Maybe its just my system being kinda slow, but I find that I have to wait longer for them to turn on than to shut off. I play 2 HW games all the time, and at best ONE set will turn on, and even then it takes a bit for it to kick in, but they start shutting off soon enough. The other set rarely does anything.

Edit: I voted for Gravity, on both sides because its just that OP, even more in the AI hands, and for Spirecraft scouts... Though after better reading I am not sure why I did the second one. Oh yeah, because some of the spirecraft is VERY useful, borderline OP in those cases, and the rest is... meh.

[Bognor]

I have manufactory control on manual and I activate them from time to time.  Sometimes it's because I'm out of one resource, but more often because I've maxed one resource.  I don't desire autocontrol, but I guess I could live with it if (1) it worked when either resource was bottomed or maxed and (2) ideally, it notified the player when it activated.

They already try do this (well, for the bottomed out case, if the bottomed out resource is trying to be used), but they do so very inconsistently and unreliably. Especially the bottomed out case. It's usually decently responsive about the maxxed out case.

Oh!  Didn't know that; thanks TechSY.  Funny how long I've been playing and I can still discover basic misconceptions I have about how the game works.

[Diazo]

Manufactories:

How about leaving the current behavior in, I feel it works well when resources are not maxed or flat-lined.

However, add two checks:

If {Resource} < 10,000, turn off all {Resource} to {Other Resource} Manufactories.

If {Resource} > 800,000 and {Other Resource} < 500,000, turn on all {Resource} to {Other Resource} Manufactories.

I don't think that would be a big deal and I think it covers all the complaints I've seen in this thread about manufactories.

D.

[Hearteater]

Except, why are they even physical structures?  Why doesn't this get done behind the scenes?  They aren't a good target for the AI since they are replaceable.  They just clutter the home system pointlessly, and possibly confuse newer players who incorrectly believe they might need to care about them.

[Aeson]

I'd prefer that they remain physical structures, since they occasionally distract fire from the home command station or home forcefields or other more valuable structures, once the forcefield cover has been compressed enough to expose them. As long as you haven't been completely overrun on the homeworld, having just that extra little distraction for the AI ships can make a difference.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, it's been about 48 hours since the poll went up, the numbers appear stable, and 32 respondents is within the normal 30-40 range, so calling it with:

Manufactory (make conversion automatic) - 11
Gravity units/structures (all of them) - 10
Spirecraft Scout - 9

3 is the number I was planning on doing anyway, but as it turns out nothing else beat "None of the above" though harvester upgrades came close.

Anyway, I've got decent (imo) ideas for how to handle each of these but will probably post follow-up threads on them today to get a bit of feedback on the specific solutions.

Thanks for the feedback!