Unstable Transit

[adeyke]

The Unstable Transit unlocked after galaxy 4 has a note that it's a work in progress. It's not clear, however, if this means the whole thing will fundamentally change, or if it will just be tweaked here and there. I hope it's the former, since the current implementation is really disappointing.

I'm able to clear six waves and (including the bonus from base 6) get 14.53 artifacts. That would translate to between a 0.07% and a 0.7% bonus every 20 hours, depending on which one I choose. It's completely negligible, and choosing to automate it reduces it below even that. It seems that my only way to increase this would be to improve my base 6 or to get better at fleet placement (which is discouraged by the limited retries). At this point, I'm considering giving up unstable transits and instead using my fuel to just grind out the travel and kill achievements.

I really enjoyed the galaxies. I like that they benefited from progress through reinforce stage giving fleet resources and achievements giving fuel efficiency. I liked that each battle gave a bonus both to that galaxy and to the main game. I liked the game-changing bonuses available via artifacts and boss battles. I liked that while good layouts were rewarded, you could largely substitute persistence via the resource dump nodes. I liked that galaxies were designed to be won. I liked that each battle only needed to be won once, but could also be tweaked repeatedly for better outcomes. And none of this applies to unstable transits.

[Sylv]

galaxies will continue and be your main interaction with fleet, except for when you are at end of content of course
unstable transit is a system you will do in between those a little bit and with various bonuses
the bonuses will remain small, these are a side bonus at most
the format will remain quite similar, but will be improved upon
they are entirely different then galaxies on purpose and will not really have progression in that same/similar ways galaxies do
retries will either go away (as in can retry as much as you want) or have like 5 or something

[adeyke]

I'm certainly looking forward to more galaxies. And I realize those take a lot of effort to design and balance, so that quality of experience isn't something I could expect from an infinitely-repeatable filler feature. And from a balancing perspective, a reward that grows exponentially without limit is dangerous. So I don't really know what concrete suggestions for improvement I could make. It's just that waiting 20 hours, then spending time trying to figure out good layouts, only to get an imperceptible bonus really isn't fun. The bonuses do eventually become powerful, but that's a process of months.

I do think having more retries available would help, especially if it also automatically used the result of the best attempt.

[Sylv]

Yes theres unfortunately just kind of competing "interests" with unstable transit
I don't want it to be something you have to do a ton, so 1ish time a day is where i want it in general
But its also not meant as a means of significant progress, so the rewards can't be such that they stack up to an actual big number over like a month or two (in the current state at least, eventually they will be bigger from building the system up).
Perhaps it would make sense to up the 75% to 85 or even 90%, or a fancier system where its 100% the firs ttime -> 90% second etc until you set a new one
Feedback/ideas on this system are very welcome, with the caveat being "don't spend too much time on critiquing it as it exists now since its quite boring/rough"

[kansas_dave]

Originally posted by Sylv:

Yes theres unfortunately just kind of competing "interests" with unstable transit
I don't want it to be something you have to do a ton, so 1ish time a day is where i want it in general
But its also not meant as a means of significant progress, so the rewards can't be such that they stack up to an actual big number over like a month or two (in the current state at least, eventually they will be bigger from building the system up).
Perhaps it would make sense to up the 75% to 85 or even 90%, or a fancier system where its 100% the firs ttime -> 90% second etc until you set a new one
Feedback/ideas on this system are very welcome, with the caveat being "don't spend too much time on critiquing it as it exists now since its quite boring/rough"

Here's an idea. How about having an auto-run feature, so that when fuel maxes out, you get the benefit of auto-running the one with the fewest artifacts. That lets people who want to 'set it and forget it'.