Does more research servers mean quicker research?

[Happy Plant]

I've had just 1 and also 4 in my first game but I'm not sure if more made any difference?

[Phoenix Cat]

No, I tried to make a second one. And it made o ly what was going on my first one. I don't think you can have more than one. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong. Would love to be able to run more than one.

[Mr.McDuck]

If you build two, it's twice as fast and so on. You need to build multiple, or the science progression will be very slow as the game advances.

All of them need to be supplied with the required science items.

[Fenix]

Originally posted by Mr.McDuck:

If you build two, it's twice as fast and so on. You need to build multiple, or the science progression will be very slow as the game advances.

All of them need to be supplied with the required science items.

Oh, that makes things a little better, but I’m still not a fan of waiting for a research timer after taking the time to set of machines to make the science packs. At the very least shorting the timers, they are too long as is.

[Mr.McDuck]

The timer and the requirement to place multiple machines provides players with a personally set goal to aim for and let's people set their own pace.

We have reworked research about 3 or 4 times now as all the alternatives had pretty severe issues (balancing, game feel, ...). Maybe we do further polishing, but player feedback so far shows that this seems to work best.

[Happy Plant]

Yeah I've noticed the difference now I've added in more servers on the later techs.

I've been playing the demo the last 2 days and I'm extremely impressed. The only down side is the lack of information and clarity with materials and more advanced crafting. For example, I've figured out I can create tier 2 refined metals, but there is nothing when it's in the inventory to differentiate between T1 and T2. Which means when you add the new T2's to your inventory they get mixed in with the others.

So I took all the T1 Xenoferrite plates out of my inventory before loading up with T2's, then crafted some smelters hoping I would finally unlock larger smelters but it still made small ones? So I'm not sure what I should be doing with them?

I suppose in the future there will be a wiki where one could look up this stuff :)

[Mr.McDuck]

Both create the same item, but the tier 2 recipe is more efficient (you need less ore for the same amount of plates).

[ryan_s_gardiner]

Originally posted by Mr.McDuck:

If you build two, it's twice as fast and so on. You need to build multiple, or the science progression will be very slow as the game advances.

All of them need to be supplied with the required science items.

I prefer the set up you have now to the earlier versions. The server is a lot more compact than the old building!

[Nepalepcy]

not sure if this is a bug but wall and ceiling lights won't work unless they are under a power source i been using burner and biomass gens not the steam gens + other high-end ones even being placed on the power gens themselves don't work

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Sirnepnep:

not sure if this is a bug but wall and ceiling lights won't work unless they are under a power source i been using burner and biomass gens not the steam gens + other high-end ones even being placed on the power gens themselves don't work

That sounds like it's working as intended? Generators don't transmit power to adjacent blocks like Minecraft redstone sources; the foundation blocks are your "power transmission" (think of it like they have internal wiring.) Light sources would need to be connected to a foundation block in order to receive power.

When it comes to HV generators like the steam turbine, you'll first need to connect the HV source to a transformer (and you'll need to have a power pole in between) and then the transformer will output to any foundation blocks that it's touching.

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Going back to the original subject of research: I really like the way that having more servers speeds up research, since it's a predictable/linear improvement that feels exponentially powerful early on; even though in reality it seems like an exponential fall-off over time (due simply to the seemingly exponential increase in costs and time of researches -- at least that's what it intuitively feels like, I haven't actually graphed it out... but assuming that's correct, and that research speed increases linearly while research cost/time increases exponentially; that means that research cost will eventually overtake everything else to become the dominant factor even if the early gains in speed will dramatically increase over that initial slow rate of growth.)

While it's not trivial to crank out multiple research servers right after the first one, it's something that you can reasonably do pretty quickly; and a single manufacturer can support a couple of research servers. With 3 servers, researching the manufacturer mark 2 feels quick; and from there you can do some updates to the factory and be ready to jump to 10 research servers pretty quickly again. At that point, you're churning through early game research in a satisfying way and unlocking meaningful improvements fast enough that they feel like they matter -- you're not doing one research and then waiting 10+ minutes for the follow-up research that will make the previous one actually meaningful/useful to your plans.

It also makes stockpiling research more fun; since you can stockpile enough to feed multiple servers and see a huge result of them all working together to plough through the research. It might not actually be faster than drip-feeding the first server (or 3) in the line, but it feels more satisfying to watch! I hope that in future there are some researches which require only specific higher-tier packages (i.e. only red or green) so that we can use those as opportunities to also stockpile the lower-tier packs in the meantime.

[Ardele]

If you setup machines to feed the servers, each server can load up 3 of each research pack at a time. Make enough machines to keep each server filled at 3 each and you have a great 900% (9 research machines) boost