Slitherine

quote:



They do consume fuel, but very very slowly.
Fuel is either Uranium or Hydrogen (or Nitrogen in the really super-advanced reactor late-game), for Fission (nuclear) and Fusion reactors respectively. They produce large amounts of energy from a single unit of fuel, to make it a bit more realistic from a scientifically accurate point of view. Nuclear reactors on naval vessels can burn their fuel for years at a time without needing to be refueled.

I have found that I am still refueling fleets reasonably often - probably about every 3 game years... and that is for 8 units of Uranium per ship... The problem is that the fuel to energy ratio is so small that the research tree shows it as 0, as your screen shot shows. However it is still burning it at the rate I've set in the game. Play for say 10 game years and you'll see your fleets need refueling once or twice in that time.

I do however agree that the fuel rate for both impulse and hyperdrive engines needs to be increased... maybe doubled. I'll test it out and see if it is better.

The early constructor ship is a ship design that needs improvement. Wack another fission reactor or two on it in the designs menu and its warp speed is much higher. I'll do that in the designs for the next release.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze

Thank you for your feedback!

Yes the bunkering is annoying. Even when I make it a pre-warp tech and another tech as a higher level (0, or 1) and they're both researched, it still picks the obsolete concrete bunkering as the most up-to-date armour and clads ships and stations with it.

I have done everything I can think of to have it work properly but it's just not playing ball, so I might remove it and possibly implement it later when I've figured out what's going on there. Maybe when the reactive setting to armour setting ratio is higher it considers it a more powerful armour, so picks it. Dunno. A fight for another day.

Regarding reactors, I have doubled their fuel consumption, which works well, but I think I'll double it again. Also I've made all thrusters and hyperdrives consume more energy, so therefore fuel is burned more quickly to replenish this energy. In my opinion and the opinion of a few "ship design how to" threads I've read, solar panels don't belong on a ship anyway, which I agree with. None of my custom designs use them, except Garrison Destroyers, which I use as mobile station defenses... slow and lumbering and the solar panels prevent them from having to periodically refuel and abandon their posts.

I will adopt your idea about Hydrogen (Fusion) reactors burning more fuel than Uranium (Fission) reactors... I like that idea, thank you.

I will be releasing another significantly more refined version soon (as shown in my development spreadsheet). I will release it as a folder so that further updates are only updated graphics or text files here and there, drastically reducing the download on updates... if you're interested I'll provide the link.

Thanks again for your input!

quote:

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze

Hi Hanekem. You are correct regarding the chemical fuel consumption in the solid fuel rockets. The game does not allow consumption of more than one type of fuel... sadly. If it did, I'd have ships consume Uranium, Oxygen, Water, Solid Fuel, Food, and a bunch of other things representing general maintenance and repairs and consumption.

quote:


So the only solution is exactly as you suggest... have it approximated by increasing fuel useage of the main reactor. I've done this by having the solid fuel rockets a much higher consumption rate than they were... about eight times as much actually. Also I've doubled the energy output of reactors so that a ship isn't bogged down by having dozens of reactors to meet the output. They have the same charge capacity as well as the same fuel-to-charge rate, so the end result is that they burn fuel much faster as well as the thrusters. The overall effect is that ships now use fuel much more quickly than they did in v0.1. Due to solving a higher-than-necessary fuel cell capacity, I have also nailed down an issue that was creating drastic fuel shortages in early-to-mid game when a player begins to really start pumping out ships and stations.

quote:


The concrete bunkering I tried exactly as you said and it still kept favouring the concrete bunkering. In the end I did a hybrid option, where the armour was put in preference to the other armour in tech level, however I replaced it with a new type of armour called Plate Steel armour... it is basically just solid steel. Basic. Simple. Expensive as hell if you want to produce a lot of ships and stations clad in it. It is easily and quickly replaced by the update of Heavy Alloy armour, and then gets into the previous version of Layered Mass armour which starts to diversify the resource requirement and begins to produce some really efficient armour results.

It doesn't do quite what I was trying to achieve by introducing Concrete Bunkering (ie: use concrete resource instead of steel resource, and free steel demand up for other applications instead) but it will do. A player will find that their steel demand quickly sky-rockets unless they research a replacement for Plate Steel armour early in the game.

I'm fairly happy with this end result, and it is included in the v0.2 update which is being released now.

quote:

Yes most feedback I've had indicates that players are not custom editing ship designs. So it's clear that I need to male ship designs work for every race as part of any release.