Suggestion: Button to trigger auto warp

[adeyke]

There are times when you know you can't make progress in the warps, or when all available warps are capped, but you still want to grab the warp essence. If your build is set up to maximize warp essence, you can just ignore that tab and let auto warp do its thing. However, if it isn't, it means you have to switch to your warp essence build, wait a minute for the warp to reach its inevitable conclusion, then switch back. It would be a lot more convenient if you could replace that minute wait with a simple button press.

Alternative suggestion: add another level the Warp Size Increase upgrade. For me right now (late game, sector 120), all 12 cores fill up in around 33 minutes, so to keep on top of it, I'd have to do manual warps about twice an hour. I wouldn't mind this if it I only had to do it a few times a day.

[Elgareth]

I don't understand the problem.
Autowarp gives you the same amount of warp essence a manual warp of the currently cleared warp sector gives you, so unless you want to progress the warps, you can just leave autowarp on and don't lose any potential warp essence.
And given that you'll probably insert the damage shard to progress the warp farther than you would without the shard, chances are that the autowarp with flex and manifest shard will give you more warp essence than a manual warp with damage shard would give you, so it's actually beneficial to let autowarp do its thing.

[adeyke]

Right now, my v device build gives a x1.1e5 bonus to synth, a x15 bonus to three columns of overdrive, and a x8 bonus to all specimen research. However, it doesn't give any bonus to warp essence.

That means I have three choices:

1. Let autowarp do its thing, giving me basically nothing.
   
2. Swap in the shards that give me bonuses to warp essence. This would drastically reduce my existing bonuses, slowing synth, overdrive, and/or research to a crawl.
   
3. Keep my build most of the time, but swap in the warp essence shards when I want to burn my warp core charges for warp essence. This is a hassle, since I have to run the warp manually. And I have to do it twice per hour if I don't want to waste charges.

What I'm asking for is either a button to make that third option quicker, or an upgrade to make me have to do it less frequently.

(Another alternative option would be to make it so auto warp somehow uses your highest-ever warp essence gain, so that it would give something even if you're not currently using the warp essence gain shards. That would be a much more radical change, though.)

[Elgareth]

Okay, then you're minmaxing a bit more than me. I just have a Overdrive/Synth/Warp Essence set and using autowarp most of the time, and just switch to specimen/research here and there.

I don't really get what another button would do. So I take it that you disable Auto Warp when full, then switch to Warp Focus, do a manual warp and overcharge it 11 times, and then go back to the non-warp setup right? I don't get where the "wait a minute" is coming from, is it because you don't turn off Auto Warp when Full? In either case I can't wrap my head around what an additional button would do :-D

[Melaeyn]

You're not meant to 'focus' on more than one thing at a time. This isn't a new thing, and if you're that far into the game, you should've already realized this with previous bottlenecks. You may as well have asked for crew 8 crew slots and 20 shard slots. If you want to focus on warp in the most resource efficient way, do that, problem solved.

[RaptorSolutions]

I'm not seeing where the 1 minute thing is coming from either. But I think a button to manually trigger autowarp is a good idea. Though this wouldn't really help your situation.

[Elgareth]

Originally posted by RaptorSolutions:

I'm not seeing where the 1 minute thing is coming from either. But I think a button to manually trigger autowarp is a good idea. Though this wouldn't really help your situation.

For that you can simply click the Autowarp when Full option and deactivate it directly after again though, so it'd just save you a single click?

[RaptorSolutions]

Originally posted by Elgareth:

Originally posted by RaptorSolutions:

I'm not seeing where the 1 minute thing is coming from either. But I think a button to manually trigger autowarp is a good idea. Though this wouldn't really help your situation.

For that you can simply click the Autowarp when Full option and deactivate it directly after again though, so it'd just save you a single click?

Oh right, you could do that. Oops.
I was thinking you turn auto warp off then you click a button when needed, but this is the same essentially.

[adeyke]

Right now, I switch to the warp essence build, open a warp, overcharge it with all my cores, start the warp, wait for it to finish, close it, then switch back to my normal build. This takes about 1 minute, with most of it happening due to needing to manually run the warp (I just timed it at around 54 seconds).

What I'd want:
I switch to the warp essence build, click a hypothetical "manually trigger auto warp" button twelve times (or a hypothetical "manually trigger auto warp for all cores" button once), then switch to my normal build.

The end result is the same. It's technically more powerful since I have one extra minute of my normal build, but this isn't significant. The big change is QoL of not having to stare at the screen for a minute.

I'm aware that the game is about focusing on only a certain things at a time. For example, the build I cited doesn't give any bonuses to specimen gain or the capital ship materials, so if I wanted to get those, I'd have to make sacrifices. The same goes for wanting applied or fundamental research instead of specimen research, or choosing different systems to overdrive. In each of those cases, I'd have to give up one thing to get another thing.

The issue this thread is about is that warp essence is different. I can have my cake and eat it, too. By doing that switching around thing, I can have almost the full benefit of synth, overdrive, and research, as well as the full benefit of warp essence. There's no tradeoff to be made in terms of game balance. It's just a bit of a hassle to do this.

I suppose that's a fourth possible solution: get rid of warp cores. If this strategy required me to do the switch every 2-3 minutes instead of every half hour, I'd abandon it and would instead either just get no warp essence or idle on a warp essence build.

[Elgareth]

Ooooh, okay, so that button would instantly use all full cores for an autowarp each.
Basically like the "Use all" setting for overdrives.

Yeah, okay, I can see that. Would also be useful to chunk out some warp essence when you're close to some upgrade.

PS: Sylv would just need to be careful on when he gives us that option. Especially early on, and again right after upgrading to massive warp, the charge times are so large that accidentally "wasting" all cores could feel devastating. So putting it somewhere at sector 100+ should be fine I think.