Thanks for the detailed response! It’s taking a while to get my head around the ways some of the mechanics work, but this is really helpful. Especially the connection of abundance to the Efficiency column in the Industry tab – I had wondered how an extractor could be waiting for input materials.
With regard to the yield/abundance numbers though:
– Is the yield stored somewhere against the extracted resource, or is it assuming that the refining will always be done at the extraction source? For example, if I have a “central refining” station with all the refineries and factories on it, and just ship in raw resources from extracting elsewhere, how will the yield modifier impact this? Could you get “better returns” by exporting low-yield minerals to a refinery in an area with much higher yield to refine?
– Is there a formula for converting the abundance number into an “approximate number of extraction modules” somewhere, other than trial and error? Doesn’t have to be exact (since I assume the “more extractors together give a bonus of scale” feature will impact it as well), but just so I can look at the number and get a sense of what it means in terms of fleet/station size, rather than just comparing it against another location and seeing which is bigger.
And a couple of other “quick fixes” that have come up in the meantime:
– A way to “unbuild” something. Currently, self-destructing a ship seems to give back no resources (as expected, since it’s instant), but “unbuilding” it by removing all the parts to recover some of the components is a micro-clicking nightmare. Having a button to “disassemble this ship” which sets all the component values to zero in one place would be amazing! This would be particularly useful early game for the 7th Fleet events, where you can unbuild some of the ships that can’t jump to use their parts to repair the rest of the fleet, but also later game when you have ships damaged in combat outside easy supply range.
– Default values or an “ALL” button in cargo transfer “Enter an amount” popups. This comes up most often when moving people, but would also be handy for other circumstances. The popup currently defaults to zero, which forces a number every time. If the popup default value was the total amount available, it would force entering a number only sometimes, when you didn’t want to “move all/max” of something. I find I’m typing 99999 into those boxes quite often.
– A way to change all Cargo Limits values at once, in proportion. For example, clicking the “100%” value in the bottom right to get a slider or something. In my case, I had a fleet that was doing manufacturing and accidentally joined a recovered hulk with 6m cargo space into it (mainly to repair) only to then realise that it was difficult to split off the hulk because the total cargo space was being filled by the cargo limits. This also happens at shipyards – building a new cargo ship results in higher limits for the entire fleet, and fills it up. Being able to take eg: General Manufacturing and have the same relative values, but only to 50% cargo space, would be amazing. It’s currently possible to do this, but involves manually clicking each line and setting the new limits.
– Related to the above, being able to mark a ship (or some part of the overall fleet cargo) as “reserved cargo” or some such, so that it does not contribute its cargo value to the fleet overall. This would be used similarly to the above to be able to break out ships from a large cargo fleet, but could also be useful for temporary storage overrides when doing some manual transfers of stuff.
Thanks again, this game is quickly consuming a lot of my time. 🙂