Do you use quality mechanic and how?

[Stranger]

IMHO, new quality mechanic in Space Age is the worst thing devs could come up with.
It breaks every rate calculation.
It breaks every blueprint design.
You cannot predict anything.
No fixed power coverage, no fixed production ratios, nothing.

The only good thing about this mechanic is you can ignore it.

Please tell me I'm wrong.
I want to love every bit of this game and I did for a while (except for non-reusable old machines), but now I have the whole layer which existence I simply don't understand.

[Fel]

That's kind of the whole point of the quality in the first place, to break down the "tried and true" layouts that we used hundreds of times without even having to think about it anymore.
It forces you to go back to think about your design instead of just pasting the same thing over and over.

And if you get everything to the highest tier (or the same tier regardless of which one it is), there will still be stable ratios, probably a bit different from the old ones we have been using until now.

If you don't enjoy this part of the game (figuring out layouts and ratios again) then yes, quality will probably get in your way more than it will help you.

[Jaregon]

I see it as a free buff to most stats. *I'm looking forward to working on higher qual modular armors. The free bigger grids sounds juicy.*

[Shurenai]

Any random chance averaged over time becomes a functionally predictable variable.

50% chance of a better quality crafting at 1/s? You might have a bad run of 10 fails, oh no!

But, over the course of a minute, that curve is much smoother. Averaged over an hour, smoother stiill, Averaged over 10 hours... it functionally becomes 0.5/s successful output.

It just requires a change in thinking, planning, and play style...which was exactly the point of the mechanic as Fel described.

[Khaylain]

I'm sure someone is going to make a mod that turns it into fully deterministic (as the base game always was (with the strange exception of uranium processing, which I still think was a mistake)) so it's always explicitly X in gives Y out, no random chance.

Sure, the law of large numbers mean that when you make a lot of something with probabilities for different quality it becomes effectively just X in and Y out, with just a bovine excrement layer between them. I don't have the expansion, and quality is part of the reason for that. Because I think the implementation is bad, and I'm voting with my wallet. But I hope the people that bought the expansion have fun with how it is now.

[Universalgenie]

I think I will use it for special purposes where quality items are only build once, like body armor. It could be nice to create a small factory for this. I don't think, that it is nescessary to produce for example legendary red science packs.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Universalgenie:

I think I will use it for special purposes where quality items are only build once, like body armor. It could be nice to create a small factory for this. I don't think, that it is nescessary to produce for example legendary red science packs.

I wouldn't use it for science packs, for sure. But... Artillery turrets? Heck yeah. Assemblers? 100%. Furnaces? Totally. Oil refineries? Trains maybe if they can be? Yep.

There's definitely some things in the mix of items that are 100% worth going for legendary, and player gear IS one of them. There's also some items that are 100% not worth it... lights, for example.

[schnappkatze]

You can still predict everything if you only switch to a new tier of quality when you can do it "all at once" for a blueprint. You just need to recalculate for the new quality.

You have a new level of quality? Just redo your blueprint and assume that everything is on the new quality level, calculate the ratios etc. and then use it. I don't see the problem. If that is not fun for you, to build new blueprints, then just don't use it I guess?

I myself don't bother too much with rate calculation etc., I just build more when I need it and look forward to fiddle with stronger machines.