Ship upgrade queue for ships in drydock. More efficient in-game time wise

[W]

Is it possible to add a queued upgrade system to ships in the drydock that add the upgrades over time while your captain is out and about doing things?

The current system is that when you buy an upgrade it installs it immediately, but your captain waits the 1-3 weeks for the upgrade to take place. Given that the story timer is already fairly tight (and somewhat controversial amongst players), I feel like this is an artificial restriction. In-game wise, why would the captain wait around for the upgrades to be made when he has another ship that is ready to go?
It makes sense to wait if he's upgrading the ship that he's currently using, but for a ship in the dry dock it would make sense from a gaming and in-game perspective for the captain to say "i'd like these 3 upgrades that take 10 weeks to install, i'll go do some stuff in these 10 weeks in the mean time".

EDIT: just to clarify, i've lost up to half a year of in game time it seems trying to upgrade a ship up to scratch, which is a hefty chunk that could have been used to do story missions etc

[Trese Brothers]

Yes, this is on the list. Thanks!

[nDervish]

Originally posted by Serialies:

The current system is that when you buy an upgrade it installs it immediately, but your captain waits the 1-3 weeks for the upgrade to take place. Given that the story timer is already fairly tight (and somewhat controversial amongst players), I feel like this is an artificial restriction. In-game wise, why would the captain wait around for the upgrades to be made when he has another ship that is ready to go?

Agreed, and not just for ships in dry dock. It should be possible to have repairs done on the ship and get medical treatment for some of the crew and send the rest of the crew to the spice hall (potentially multiple times!) and have your captain participate in a tense negotiation to complete a mission, all at the same time instead of waiting for each activity to be completed before starting the next one.

[davea]

Originally posted by nDervish:

It should be possible to have repairs done on the ship and get medical treatment for some of the crew and send the rest of the crew to the spice hall (potentially multiple times!) and have your captain participate in a tense negotiation to complete a mission, all at the same time instead of waiting for each activity to be completed before starting the next one.

In the lore for the universe, the captain must personally accompany the crew to each activity or they may be arrested. I try to make sure to complete any time critical missions before drydock or any extensive landing. It's possible to only repair part of the ship, or heal only some of the crew, before finishing a deadline, but I agree it does increase the amount of planning you need to do.

[nephilimnexus]

Ideally, all of the different windows for upgrade, repairs, medical and shore leave would all simply be combined into one menu that (like the others) just lets you put check-boxes on the activities you want to perform (with multiple passes for spice hall) within the time frame of whatever the longest taking thing that you've selected.

Example: When you open the menu, everything starts in white font. You pick a task, and that project becomes the leader and changes to a red font color. Menawhile, any other projects that could be done cuncurrent to that task gets changed to blue font to show that they won't take any extra time (just money). If something would go over that time lime, it fades to a gray font (but can still be selected, becoming the new main project in red).

One menu to rule them all!

[Trese Brothers]

Thanks for the feedback! Just push the "ALL" button :D

[Regularity]

Originally posted by Serialies:

just to clarify, i've lost up to half a year of in game time it seems trying to upgrade a ship up to scratch, which is a hefty chunk that could have been used to do story missions etc

Yup. Always found it weird that you can get a ship instantly, but refitting it takes months.

Also, to developers: Maybe consider making refit times vary based on ship max mass. Refitting a titan should, reasonably, take a lot more time than refitting a scout. Even if the same number of modules are changed, the titan's are far larger and would require more materials and workers.

[davea]

I guess if you go to the car dealer and you want to buy one off the lot, you can jump right in and drive off. But, if you want a custom color, and these particular add-ons, then you have to wait.

I'm pretty sure that modules are the same size for all ships, so a module that fits into a small bay on a scout is the same module that would fit into a small bay on a titan. Titans just have more bays.

[Regularity]

Originally posted by dave:

I'm pretty sure that modules are the same size for all ships, so a module that fits into a small bay on a scout is the same module that would fit into a small bay on a titan. Titans just have more bays.

True, but the added mass makes the work harder. Getting at the reactor of a scout ship would require a lot less cutting and moving aside of parts than getting at the reactor of a titan, right? It's like moving a desk to the first floor of a small town house versus moving a desk to the 5th story in the west wing of a giant mansion.

[Pyoro-2]

Might be that way, or might be that the extra space and weight of a larger ship allows of easier component removel because they have build-in measures to get to stuff while in scout ships everything is so squeezed in you can't get to it ... like, maneuvering a huge desk into a tiny garden shed will be trickier than pushing it through double-doors and up some enormous stair cases of a mansion. Even if the mansion is larger and you to move it further, but you don't need to dismantle the roof to get into it ...

What I'd like to see though is changing multiple modules at the same time.

I don't mind if it's not there either though, I just chalk it up to "one of those game things".

[CoryTrese]

Thanks for the feedback. Both of the people who work on the game are very excited to keep trying to improve.

[Regularity]

Did a quick test. It currently took me about two in-game years to fully refit an entire small (2400 or 3400 mass) ship. On average they have about 16 modules, though I probably replaced closer to 19 since I ended trying different combinations of modules to tweak mass to fit. That seems a pretty unforgiving amount of time for even a small ship to stay in drydock, given the constant ticking of deadline clocks for stoylines.

[davea]

Since I know getting a new ship takes a long time, and it doesn't happen very often, I try to schedule this when I am not in the middle of an exciting storyline.

[nephilimnexus]

It's interesting to note that ship repair times are all based on the longest project. If you open the detail menu for it, and uncheck all, then manually go through and check them off yourself you can see how if one project will take 10 weeks and another 8 weeks, you can check both and it will just take 10 weeks (not 18). So repair projects already run concurrent to each other.

I mention this to show that the code for doing concurrent projects is already in the game. The problem is that it only covers repairs. If that menu could be expanded horizontally across the screen and new columns made for hospital time & shore leave... well, that would solve everything, now wouldn't it? They'd get the same treatment that repairs already do, and could be done alongside them.

Now if you wanted to expand on that make it so that when you go buy a part the part would no longer be automatically installed. Instead it would just be a part in a crate at the drydock, and you would have to create a work order to install it. Once that work order is done, it gets added to the rest of the menu. That way if you've got a long repair on your engine and wanted to swap out a turret while you waited then you could do those at the same time as well.

While that second feature would probably take a lot more work to inject into the game, it would have the advantage of letting players keep spare parts laying around.