SMR-CNN

Oh, and I'd be willing to give anyone the spreadsheet I've made to take a look at changing around build time and costs.

I haven't taken into account planet stocking costs over time, and I'd like to throw out whether that should have any influence on how we're looking at changing build times and costs. They're not really that big, but they are there.

Someone should look over Elvis Fetts earlier post on planet building. His basic idea as I recall was:

Zero build time but with massively increased goods requirement.

The benefits is that you don't have to spend all your time online to start a building at a specific time, but you have to work (as an alliance) to stock the planet to make sure you have the proper ressources to build. This would make planet building to a real chore like trading and hunting and not just sitting around waiting for time to run out

I think perhaps the two ideas could be combined...

I liked that idea. Anyone know why nothing came of it?

I think it was because EF was working on it, and claimed he had it close to perfect when he disapeared. Personally, with how planets are far away from ports now I'm not sure how practical it'd be-if someone could figure out a setup like that, I'd be all for it. The trick would be balancing it right.

Its a interesting idea, but would take lots off work to get it right. I think going for planets buildings being fast start of game and then take longer as planets get bigger would be a lot easier done, and it should help.

I agree Thauglor. It could be a quick-fix and then perhaps we could work on the other idea on the longer term. Port would of course have to be put back nearer the planets, but I think I'd like that anyways...

This would be fun with a large common planets galaxy. We'd have a ton of traders ferrying goods to planets - talk about a hunters paradise. Suddenly it requires skill and teamwork to build planets !

Okay. Now, if we tried something like that (assuming that changed planet times could be easily coded), here's a few more questions I'd like to throw outl, assuming we just go with a stopgap solution for now:

1) Should we also increase cost at the beginning so that alliances don't claim planets all over the place? A penalty of sorts for the decreased building time, and then have the cost decrease as the building times increase?

2) Do you think it'd be more balanced if the build time was based on the planet level, or was based on the number of specific buildings that already existed? (e.g., the first two turrets take x long, the next two take y long to build, the first 20 generators take x long, the first 20 hangars take x long, and so on). The major problem with this would be how long the last turrets would take-18 hours is pretty long to begin with, but doubling or tripling it would seem like a bit of overkill.

3) Should we increase the resource cost, or just leave it where it is until we can figure out the 0 time building solution?

I'd like to hear how feasible something like this would be to code, because once we figured that out, I think the community could come up with the number for it.

i think planet building is fine how it is now. I think we have more pressing issues facing the game than this. planet building is one of the few things that works right game after game.

How is planet building working when noone are building planets this game?

I personally feel that no ports near planets is a mistake. It's far too demanding to buiild atm