-Faster Starts: Players now start out with an Mark II Energy Rector, two Mark II Engineers, and all of their metal/crystal harvester points on their home planet assigned at the start of the game. This cuts down on the repetitive opening-game actions that players always take, and lets players get right to the actual real game much more quickly.
Thank coder! I always wondered why you didn't start out with harvesters pre-built on your home planet, but never cared enough to mention it.
Sure thing!
-Engineers can now be paused.
Of course, this now begs: "Engineer auto-powerdown" in FRD mode. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why this shouldn't happen as there are reasons why and ways to make it interesting (delay after last action before power down, delay before auto power-up, etc.).
Cheers!
I don't plan on having any auto-powerdown functionality, ever. I think it's too fiddly, and really this is just an option that should not become a lynchpin of player strategies. It's something to use when energy is running low, when you want to have cloaked ships make a stealth attack, or when you simply don't want your engineer running around messing with stuff, but otherwise that's pretty much it. If you're skating at the edge of not enough energy and want to micromange what is powered on and what is not at any given time, then I guess you can, but the penalty for that is having to micromanage it. The normal solution to this scenario would be to just take another planet and/or build some more reactors, and that's the only behavior I want to encourage with interface niceties. I think CC will have a fit if this sort of economy microing becomes a standard/needed tactic, and I'm with him on that.
It's 3000 energy (do these really need to cost energy?)
Why don't they generate energy just like they generate resources? Upgrades could generate more...
Yep, see the next version (C).
Oh, and I wish it was easier to tell how much energy a group of ships cost. Since I'm having to delete things or pause things a lot to get back into the black, I'm having to check the tooltips a lot, which is slow because I'm doing it ship by ship. I wish I could just select a group and see 'oh, hey, this group I don't need is 40,000 energy' or 'this group here is only 1000 energy, so I don't need to worry about it'.
You could have extra info in the "selected units" tooltip:
1) Total energy use (current)
2) Maximum energy use if everything fully powered up
3) Minimum energy use if everything low powered
This could also be expanded to include total resource use if anything that uses resources is selected.
Cheers!
Also see C, although it's nothing quite as involved as showing that many stats (which I think would largely just clutter the display. I also plan a hotkey for showing high-using ships at any time.
