Cargo capacity, of the fleet carrier

[DemiserofD]

if they're useless, why are people complaining about not having enough room because they're adding all of the modules?

Either there is a point to the modules and so they are desirable and making players use up all their space ...or that's not an issue and this is a complaint being made by bad players who make bad decisions in equipping useless stuff.

if the former is true, then you're wrong and it's not useless and my statement above applies. If the latter is true then this isn't a game-problem (except that the game is filled with stuff that is useless like most of the commodity board and various modules nobody uses), but rather a player problem that is easily solved by not buying useless stuff.

There's a difference between literally and practically useless.

It's like... Ecm.

It's not literally useless. I would like to carry it if I could. But by comparison to other things, it is practically useless in so many circumstances it's never worth actually using. But I still want to. And not being able to is annoying.

 

[Oddy-B]

With all but one facility and no modules to sell my carrier can hold in excess of 18k tritium. This is plenty for long journeys. As some have said it is about managing your fleet carrier.

 

[Darth Ender]

There's a difference between literally and practically useless.

It's like... Ecm.

It's not literally useless. I would like to carry it if I could. But by comparison to other things, it is practically useless in so many circumstances it's never worth actually using. But I still want to. And not being able to is annoying.

if it's desired enough to be upset to the point of making forum threads and configuring your ship so it's otherwise sacrificing things you find "practically useful" then it's obviously not as useless as you're stating. And it serves it's purpose as a compromise option to incentivize strategic specialization and specialization allows for interaction and thus gameplay to exist and grow. All good things. Having a "i can do everything at once" ship doesn't add to the game. And the cost of such a ship, credits, is not a meaningful compromise that has any hope of driving the lost specialization and related gameplay.

 

[DemiserofD]

if it's desired enough to be upset to the point of making forum threads and configuring your ship so it's otherwise sacrificing things you find "practically useful" then it's obviously not as useless as you're stating. And it serves it's purpose as a compromise option to incentivize strategic specialization and specialization allows for interaction and thus gameplay to exist and grow. All good things. Having a "i can do everything at once" ship doesn't add to the game. And the cost of such a ship, credits, is not a meaningful compromise that has any hope of driving the lost specialization and related gameplay.

That's just it though; it doesn't increase the variety of the game, it decreases it. Modules that might be used by some people in some circumstances are instead used by nobody in any circumstance.

Just because one choice is exponentially better than the other, doesn't make the other not wanted at all.

Using ECM as an example, I would never sacrifice another utility for ECM. But, if I could choose between a ship that had four utility slots, and another ship that had four utility slots, as well as an ECM, I would generally choose the second, thereby proving that while it's value is low, it is not zero.

 

[Darth Ender]

That's just it though; it doesn't increase the variety of the game, it decreases it. Modules that might be used by some people in some circumstances are instead used by nobody in any circumstance.

Just because one choice is exponentially better than the other, doesn't make the other not wanted at all.

Using ECM as an example, I would never sacrifice another utility for ECM. But, if I could choose between a ship that had four utility slots, and another ship that had four utility slots, as well as an ECM, I would generally choose the second, thereby proving that while it's value is low, it is not zero.

Unlike an ecm, which only helps you, shop modules on a carrier and the like are functional for other people as well. And so services interact and are shared systems between a number of carriers.

If the service has value, someone will be incentivized to provide it for the others since it will be excluded from most carriers...making their ship much more important by sacrificing directly being able to provide some of the more "important" services. That's the value added and the power of that compromise. Other players wanting to use that service will now interact with the fewer carriers that offer it, and those carriers will gain a significant amount of interaction by being in-demand ...compared to offering a service everyone else is already offering. Likewise the owners of these few carriers have to interact with other carriers for the missing services ...and so on.

I could see the argument maybe if this was a solo game, but it falls apart because the game is intended to be specifically not a solo game. You aren't meant to go-it-alone even though in most cases you can, easily.

If it's a service important enough to care about having, then it's a service important enough to be used as a means of strategic configuration since it has a roll in what makes up the player economy.

edit: and if it turns out it's not important enough to sacrifice the other services for anyone and nobody offers it, then it's just dead weight in the game. It wouldn't be the only thing that's dead weight due to the simplistic balancing this game has for things. E class modules are entirely useless. Almost all of the commodity board is entirely pointless. Even certain modules. But unfortunately, you can't target just the dead weight in allowing changes to these compromise choices. You would also eliminate the need to compromise on the stuff that does matter. So a better option would be to refactor the dead weight so that it's not dead weight or eliminate them from the game if it's a nuisance.

 

[DemiserofD]

Unlike an ecm, which only helps you, shop modules on a carrier and the like are functional for other people as well. And so services interact and are shared systems between a number of carriers.

If the service has value, someone will be incentivized to provide it for the others since it will be excluded from most carriers...making their ship much more important by sacrificing directly being able to provide some of the more "important" services. That's the value added and the power of that compromise. Other players wanting to use that service will now interact with the fewer carriers that offer it, and those carriers will gain a significant amount of interaction by being in-demand ...compared to offering a service everyone else is already offering. Likewise the owners of these few carriers have to interact with other carriers for the missing services ...and so on.

I could see the argument maybe if this was a solo game, but it falls apart because the game is intended to be specifically not a solo game. You aren't meant to go-it-alone even though in most cases you can, easily.

If it's a service important enough to care about having, then it's a service important enough to be used as a means of strategic configuration since it has a roll in what makes up the player economy.

Only there is no player economy. The only reason you would have to equip outfitting or shipyards is out of generosity, since you can't really make any profit off of it, and the only advantage over buying modules for yourself is the ability to give things to others.

While generosity can be a powerful motivating factor, when it comes at a direct and permanent cost your own capabilities, it becomes a much less appealing prospect.

 

[DemiserofD]

Here's what I'd like to see; rather than buying the modules themselves and storing them, you would buy a license to produce the item yourself, and then you would stock up on components used to construct those items. They could also be produced with mined minerals.

These licenses could be phenomenally expensive; the license to produce cutters, for example, might cost 25 billion credits on its own.

But that way, if a player wanted to sell some Niche module, like a research Limpet controller, or a Recon Limpet controller, or an ECM, they could do so without compromising the capabilities of their carrier.

Even better, it would give players an almost endless goal to work towards. Having the licenses for every ship in the game could cost 500 billion credits oh, and be an enormous source of pride for the owner and the entirety of their Squadron.

 

[Darth Ender]

Only there is no player economy. The only reason you would have to equip outfitting or shipyards is out of generosity, since you can't really make any profit off of it, and the only advantage over buying modules for yourself is the ability to give things to others.

While generosity can be a powerful motivating factor, when it comes at a direct and permanent cost your own capabilities, it becomes a much less appealing prospect.

There is a player economy, you have players talking about buying and selling stuff from their carriers all the time.

The problem might be that it's not as powerful as it should be. But that's a totally separate issue. Having a player economy grow and become more visible to you and others is far more important for the game than a change that would erode that budding gameplay.

If the thargoid war collapsed the services most stations offer in the game leaving carriers to be a significant portion of where those services still exist, then the specialization of them becomes massively powerful. That is not possible if they all can offer the same thing. A semblance of that exists even now, just to a much lower degree due to the saturation of alternatives all around players in the bubbles.

what this ask wants is to make an "i can do everything" ship.. and that's not good for gameplay.

 

[DemiserofD]

There is a player economy, you have players talking about buying and selling stuff from their carriers all the time.

The problem might be that it's not as powerful as it should be. But that's a totally separate issue. Having a player economy grow and become more visible to you and others is far more important for the game than a change that would erode that budding gameplay.

If the thargoid war collapsed the services most stations offer in the game leaving carriers to be a significant portion of where those services still exist, then the specialization of them becomes massively powerful. That is not possible if they all can offer the same thing. A semblance of that exists even now, just to a much lower degree due to the saturation of alternatives all around players in the bubbles.

what this ask wants is to make an "i can do everything" ship.. and that's not good for gameplay.

I was referring specifically to the lack of an economy around outfitting and shipyards. The Commodities Market is an entirely different matter. It's actually a great example, though; have you noticed that the Commodities Market doesn't weigh anything? One of the principal reasons why players can trade Commodities effectively is because they don't have to sacrifice anything to do it.

Outfitting and shipyards have to compete directly with this, while requiring massively more space at no benefit, and as a result, no such player economy exists.

If commodity trading took up five to ten thousand of your space & capped out at 100% markup from the galactic average, barely anyone would do that, either.

 

[Darth Ender]

Here's what I'd like to see; rather than buying the modules themselves and storing them, you would buy a license to produce the item yourself, and then you would stock up on components used to construct those items. They could also be produced with mined minerals.

These licenses could be phenomenally expensive; the license to produce cutters, for example, might cost 25 billion credits on its own.

But that way, if a player wanted to sell some Niche module, like a research Limpet controller, or a Recon Limpet controller, or an ECM, they could do so without compromising the capabilities of their carrier.

Even better, it would give players an almost endless goal to work towards. Having the licenses for every ship in the game could cost 500 billion credits oh, and be an enormous source of pride for the owner and the entirety of their Squadron.

converting to a scarce-ish economy based on something other than credits is almost definitely going to improve things over what we have now, sure. And by having a fixed storage size and balanced recipe cost to item produced, you can retain specialization without globally limiting your possible options. Since players will have to put out buy orders and sell orders and not be bothered with collecting stuff from all over by themselves since that will take too much time. But that's not really the spirit of what the op is asking for, it's a re-imagining of what carriers are and how the game economy works. Which is great, the game economy is garbage currently.

Something like that would work for carriers in a way that would make us both happy, but it's a pretty huge change of how the game currently works to get there. And for it to really work, either the stuff on carriers you buy needs to be unique to carriers or the alternative places you buy these things in non-carrier stations needs to be reduced or currency changed or eliminated in some fashion.


edit: really this is closer to an idea of what I imagined Dredgers would be like if fdev was cool and implemented dredgers as a craftable -player owned mega ship. A mobile factory / refinery based on consuming commodities and materials. Producing commodities and ship parts for resale.

 

[CMDR_A1R]

why not just remove all the limits in the carrier completely then nobody has to worry about what to put in it or how much cargo space is needed as its exponential

 

[ciberloky]

I would be happy with increasing the capacity, 10k or 15k more, but it is true that with the expansion there are new options that can help other players not only the owner of the carrier, so the figure of 50k would not be illogical ,if ,I continue thinking the same to increase the capacity of the carrier according to the modules installed as if they were containers. Surely many of you say that it is crazy but for more than 30M per week that it costs us to provide the service to other commanders (which I am delighted to do), since I would not need some modules as the owner, it would be well worth that increase in capacity. or even the increase to 5K of the capacity of the tritium deposit would be good.

 

[marceloadrianp]

I think the main idea is that we have more space in the carrier, especially to be able to make longer trips without having to waste hours mining tritium.