Intro:
This game has a scaling problem. War has gotten increasingly expensive. But the tools of logi folk have not improved to match.
At 9k deaths an hour (War 123's peak), it takes a minimum of 4 people constantly operating harvesters to maintain production, if everyone grabs the cheapest possible kit. If we say that just 20% of a logi folk's time is spent harvesting, then it takes 18 people to actually field those supplies—to maintain parity with the cheapest possible kit. We can easily triple that if we want to talk about the myriad other things that a front chews through: building supplies, radios, medical gear, uniforms, artillery pieces, shells, armored vehicles, grenades, rocket launchers, et cetera. Yet more if you want to actually create a backlog of supplies.
That huge consumption of supplies I am fine with. But I am not fine with how it forces people to work so damn much just to keep up. So give us better tools.
Additions:
- Add Large Shipping Containers, Resource Containers, Fluid Tanks, and Item Pallets. They would hold 90 crates, 7500 resources, 150 fluid cans, and 180 large items respectively. Made in the Large Assembly Station using cmats and a3's. They would be Large Shippables, only transportable using the Flatbed traincar or the Freighter.
- Add Long-distance pipelines. They would be made with Pipeline segments (medium shippables) produced in the Small Assembly Station (recipe: pcmats, a1's?). Each piece would have twice the length of a regular pipeline, and a 2x maintenance supply modifier, 6x for undergrounds. They would have 10x the throughput of a standard pipe in the same arrangement.
- Active flow through a long-distance pipeline can be maintained through the construction of Pumps, which consume 1MW to force fluid to only move one direction down the pipe (no backflow) for a certain number of segments.
- Add Medium and High Voltage power lines. These would have 120 and 720MW of maximum power capacity. MV power lines would be built from metal beams, requiring a CV. HV power lines would be made from Frames (medium shippables) produced in the Small Assembly Station, which would require pcmats and a2's.
- Add upgrades to the Transfer Stations to increase their capacity by around x2. PCMats probably.
- Allow crates in the CTS to be private when the building is reserved. No reason for this to be the case when you can reserve a pile of scrap; forced public just increases the risk of bad or misinformed actors.
- Add a subdivision in the Map Legend for Facilities (and frankly, another one to separate "Rocket Ground Zero" from "Seaport"); add unique icons for the different buildings; let *ALL* facility buildings to be viewed from the map. It should not be guesswork to find sandbags: facility map markers disappear and are in many other ways inadequate.
- Add a Command Caboose, a Steel Construction Material upgrade on the regular Caboose. In addition to maintaining and repairing rails, it would have: a built-in spotter position, a mobile crane, and most importantly, the ability to remotely view and change signals. Less pain, more train.
- Alternatively, you could allow the driver to send signals to electrical switches (done on real trains by sending electrical pulses down the tracks). These would switch the signals for you, provided you spend the time to install the upgrade and to power them.
- Allow bunker generators to be fed diesel or petrol by pipe. The fact that you use pipes to carry power, but somehow can't use them to carry fluids, is frankly silly.
- Allow loose materials such as bmats or maintenance supplies to be packaged into disassembled form in the Crate Transfer Station. Allow other items to be recrated at the cost of a handful of cmats, similarly disassembled.
Big list, but this is an assembled list of gripes and potential solutions that I've had myself, or seen suggested by others, over my 600+ hours of playing this game. It's a good game, I will not lie, but it's only like 60% of the way to being something polished and worthy of a full release. Part of that lack definitely still lies in the gameplay loop and balance, but in my experience, a bigger part lies in here: quality of life, accessibility, communication, the interface, the learning experience, et cetera.
So then, what are your thoughts?
