A new experience for manufacturing, research, blueprint copying, invention and reverse engineering
The new user interface looks very nice to use. The left-to-right flow of input, process, and output appears pretty clear on what you have, what you need, and what you get. In the current system it was always annoying to gather all the things you thought you needed into the one location and then not find out you were 100 Tritanium short until you clicked that final button. This new UI looks like it will all be clear from the very beginning.
Dynamic pricing across the universe
I really like the idea of a dynamic workforce moving across the galaxy in search of the best wages. I never really considered there were actual people performing my research and manufacturing jobs. Much in the same way I never think about the lore of how many non-capsuleers there are aboard my ship at any one time. The removal of slots is quite a big thing for wormholes. In my corp we provide a research and manufacturing POS as a perk for the members. The bottleneck is most definitely the research lab slots. Now this bottleneck will shift to what people are willing to pay to have research carried out.
Travelling worker teams
This really continues on from the above section. These teams add a nice little twist to manufacturing in known space. I've no idea if we would be able to recruit specialised teams into our wormhole system, never mind if we would even want to.
Reprocessing renewed
The UI shown in the devblog is nicer than the current interface but the existing interface was good enough for what I needed. Unlike manufactoring, reprocessing was quite often a case of 'select all → reprocess' and see what minerals turned up in the hanger. For me, though, the real improvement here is the removal of the perfect refine. That never made sense to me. Even the best manufacturing process should produce some waste, and no recycling process can recover absolutely all the materials present in a given item. Adding these inefficiencies up struck a hollow note when hearing how people would haul masses of minerals around space by building then reprocessing 425mm railguns.
Blueprints and research
I don't really have an opinion on the changes to material efficiency and production efficiency. It's just replacing one set of numbers with a different set of numbers. For new players coming into the game it will be more intuitive I guess. When I didn't know better I would just research everything to 10 anyway. Thankfully I knew better by the time I acquired an Orca BPO.
Starbases
Living in a POS means this directly applies to me. It will finally be worthwhile reprocessing ore in a wormhole due to the k-space reprocessing nerf. We rarely bother to mine but when we do it was always a pain to accept the large refining loss or haul out to K-space to avoid that. Now we'll have a better yield in the wormhole. Yay, one less chore. Also the new compression array will be sweet should we ever go full carebear and start giant mining fleets munching on the ore sigs in our system. But what about the poor Rorqual? The other changes are mostly the removal of slots so see comments in other sections above. The only addition is the bonus to costs by anchoring more than one of a given module. We're not an industrial corp so I can't see me bothering to do that. In fact, where we already have more than one of a given module I'll probably be pulling the spare one down.
Dynamic station sound
The sound changes based on the amount and type of industrial activity going on in a station? That sound pretty cool actually (sounds... geddit??)
New API endpoints for industry features
I'm sure the community will release some cool new tools off the back of this. For me though it's a pretty 'Meh' thing.
Fleet Warp Opt-out
This is going to be hilarious on RvB Ganked roams when splinters of people get left behind and have no idea why. I must sort out some time to get on one of those roams, post-Crius.
Fit modules without having the required skills
From time to time I put together a selection of ships for corp or alliance roams. I have a 'janitor' character out near Amarr who takes care of this for me. Usually he just bundles all the pieces together in a contract and leaves the recipient to assemble the ship. Now I'll have the option to actually fit the ships properly (if I spend the SP on being able to sit in them in the first place). Maybe I'll finally have a reason to activate dual-training on that account.
So there we have it folks. My thoughts on the upcoming expansion patch release Crius thingy, which is coming to us on July 22nd.
No comments:
Post a Comment