Edit 2:
I did some up-to-date testing & checking in game around the shipyard stuff, rather than basing it off of old posts I saw, and came up with this suggestion instead: viewtopic.php?f=146&t=462023#p5226198
Also edited the title to reflect whats being asked for, and the fact there are now different suggestions designed to make things inconsistent.
As of this time, for slow pilot ranking, its just not meaningful enough to really be kept in the game as a mechanic so unless someone can prove that things become actually way too OP if pilots level up at a rate similar to literally every other job in the game I still advocate that particular nerf against the player is just completely arbitrary confusion for new players.
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Edit 1:
To clarify:
I am not asking for the game to be considerably easier - I'm asking for it to not have obtuse and contrived anti-QoL features.
These mechanics are *not* really penalizing veteran players at all, they are just QoL annoyances.
These mechanics only penalize new players who don't know any better and have to ask around.
I dont even play in a way that would really benefit from these things being changed - the main benefit to me is in not having to explain this stuff to new players and being like 'trust me, underneath all these incomprehensible design decisions is a game you can enjoy' to their looks of skepticism.
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Original post:
I'm talking about things like:
* selling ships from a shipyard is subject to a huge penalty (essentially giving the AI a 75% discount or something)
* pilot leveling is ridiculously slow
* miner leveling (as slow as it already is) is capped
From the discussions I have seen, the vast majority of players hate these things - either new players who struggle with them because they suffer through it while not even realizing that these issues are actually mechanics rather than bugs, or veterans who just dont want to deal with the busywork bypassing them entails.
All of these things are trivial for an experienced player to work around, they literally only serve to add annoying busywork of navigating menus and making extra clicks for an experienced player, while making the game much more frustrating for a new player who doesnt understand the mechanics of the game well enough to bypass them.
[Edit 2: This section has been superseded by the following post based on much more accurate current (7.0 beta) in-game checking: viewtopic.php?f=146&t=462023#p5226198]
- If you want money, just set all your factories to trade internally till the last product you intend to sell (or make an all-in-one factory), and then sell the final product for the smallest increment under 'normal price', because the trade AI simply buys for "less than normal price" and sells for "higher than normal price" rather than explicitly trying to buy lower than the sell price, for performance reasons
- OR, very slightly more economically efficient and you can force the AI to take your materials whenever you want even if they are saturated, but requires manual steps: build ships manually and then order them to an AI shipyard to be sold
Both of these are actually inferior from a gameplay mechanics perspective for the AI player, because they aren't getting completed ships they can use, but rather materials. Selling a ship to their shipyard only results in it being scrapped, and the materials were already just materials, while to the actual player they make no difference because its just money.
Also by the time you actually get your own shipyard, you are most likely operating off of an internal economy, or just building fleets (via war missions) for the terrans on repeat for huge profits.
A new player who has just reached endgame for the first time instead just finds themselves getting ripped off by their shipyard constantly just selling stuff for a huge loss to the AI until they discover they need to disable that.
Ultra-slow pilot leveling, leveling caps:
- every other job type levels up way faster - its just pilots that level like beans, so new players are constantly complaining about this because its not obvious how to bypass it.
- economy ship pilot level & auto-commands can be bypassed by simply making a small depot station and utilizing the commander's level to extend their ranges. This is not at all obvious to a new player.
- non-capships (S, M) die so often whats the point of giving them high level pilots? Especially the civilian ships - a pirate or kha'ak sneezes on them and they just explode.
- powerleveling pilots in capships is easy enough
- new players keep thinking autominers are bugged for not increasing past 3*
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Note:
The kha'ak anti-mining mechanics (makes anything but L ore miners utterly pointless, hurts the AI economy far more than that of a veteran player) and 7.0 beta 1-3 crisis are also really bad for the game in their current states, and while I think the latter should be temporarily removed to completely rework, I dont think either lacks a place in the game, AFTER receiving serious changes at least. As a result I don't list them as things that should be completely removed, unlike these weird arbitrary penalties listed above.