Space missions time

[avilmask]

When you are ready to invest into rocketry, it's basically when you trampled your way into a late game (maintenance of 30 expectations dupe, 2t of steel only to make a starting engine, + all the steel you need to make basics to protect your surfacing place from meteor bombing, for this you need a stable colony).

After that, only way you can get new stuff to play with is space. And there comes idling time. I wonder, if it's necessary to wait for whole 3 cycles per 10k km? I've lost my interest when I hit 30k km. 9 cycles. 9 cycles of looking for stuff to do, or just watching asteroid spins at speed 4. Make more rockets? But at 60k km it's still 18 cycles. Riddle your whole colony with rocket silos just to not die of boredom? In my opinion, 1 cycle per 10k km would be long enough.

What's your thoughts about that? How do you occupy  yourself in downtime? How many rockets you build? Does waiting time feel balanced to you?

 

(When you reload a game and see some modules from your spaceship that supposed to be on a mission, is just soul crashing. It means that rocket is bugged and will return with nothing).

[CDoroFF]

May be you made rockets too late? When everything built and explored except the space there is not so much to do. It's a bit wierd coz I just started my way to my 1st rocket (ready to build LOX for oxydizer, telescope and train astronauts) and i expect what I will have a tonns of various activities at the moment of the first launch. Currently I'v got only temporal versions of stuff. I mean, i do not cook oil to petrolium - just refine it. My SPOM's small and bad located. My both pipe systems at most places are just awful sphagetti, which could be simplified significantly. I need a thousands of cycles to tune whole base to perfect state and rocket launch is something about one third of this way.
p.s. How to transfer liquid oxygen to the rocket? With the LOX built in dev mode liquid O2 vaporise and blows up my insulated pipes made of igneous rock instantly.

[Nitroturtle]

I agree with the OP.  I've launched enough rockets to explore even the furthest planets, but then it gets boring.  At the point where you need to farm space materials (I use 'need' loosely, mainly because everything is built at this point) it takes far too long for far too little reward.  I found myself wanting to use the space materials to re-build stuff and further optimize, but quickly became bored waiting for space missions to complete as I really had nothing else to do at that point but wait.  The rate at which insulation can be made is laughable.  By the time I had around 10 tons of super coolant, I was barely able to make a 12x4 room with insulation.  In fairness, I did make some visco-gel as well, but still..

It also doesn't seem like the distance is proportionate to the return materials.  I'm not sure about the space only stuff that lists as 'trace amounts', but for anything that requires a gas or liquid cargo bay, I believe the values are fixed.  Which means the further you travel, the LESS stuff you can bring back, due to weight penalties.  I'm just hoping at some point they will review it all and update it to be more worthwhile.  Or, you know, let us land on distant planets and build stuff there.. 

[Sasza22]

3 cycles doesn`t seem that bad for the closest destinations but it adds up quickly. Waiting 20+ cycles was a pain when i couldn`t save the game due to the risk of losing the rocket when loading due to bugs.

I think higher tech engines should lower the travel times. 2 cycles per 10k km for petroleum and 1 cycle for hydrogen.

[ruhrohraggy]

Also agreeing that distance should correlate to reward.

Material gains should shift from "Trace" to % and then to high % yield with rare materials. The further you go, the more the material list should be filled with exotic materials, at higher %'s.

I realized this all too soon. As sending a petrol rocket with 3x cargo bays to a close 7% iso resin, was much better than sending it to a distant 10% isoresin with 1 cargo bay.

[hpongledd]

I usually start a new base

Jokes aside. If somebody from Klei reads that, think about something! Late game is kinda boring.

This time i didnt even launch one single petroleum rocket and my LOX & hydrogen, steam chamber are all ready and waiting for some niobium. But i guess they will never get it.

2 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

Or, you know, let us land on distant planets and build stuff there.. 

This would be incredible cool! There are some mods around that generate special maps. This could be an idea and on those planets you could find "naturally" some rare material which could be exported to other planets etc. etc.

[bountygiver]

I just hope they made different engine have different speed, currently there's just not much incentive to use H2 engine, it only allows you to fit like 2 more cargo than petrol but you use so much more water to make it, while for petroleum you can just use your LOX coolant heat to cook crude oil and get 2 birds with one stone. (You also send all the heat into space instead of accumulating heat in your base while sending cold hydrogen out)

[Xuhybrid]

3 days is not really an issue but when it gets up to like 15-30 cycles, it gets pretty long. It hurts even more when you need to bring back cargo but have to wait such a long time between cargo runs, and the cargo themselves are so small. How can something that takes up a 5x5 tile, bring back 1T of materials when a 2x1 storage compactor can hold 20T? I'm not asking for 20T per cargo but if you're going to make multiple cargo have huge weight penalties, then 1-4T per trip is just unfair, unproductive and severely lowers the value proposition, when you consider the fuel and time required. If it was 1T of one resource, it might be more viable to keep the mass around 1T but as it stands, you only get like 250Kg of any particular resource per cargo. That's absolutely nothing lol.

[Oozinator]

@avilmask Some of this is fixed in actual preview build.

[avilmask]

12 hours ago, CDoroFF said:

I need a thousands of cycles to tune whole base to perfect state and rocket launch is something about one third of this way.

You know what they say

 

 

25 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

@avilmask Some of this is fixed in actual preview build.

There is another preview build except qol_1? Because I didn't see any changes in qol_1.

[SakuraKoi]

9 hours ago, hpongledd said:

Jokes aside. If somebody from Klei reads that, think about something! Late game is kinda boring.

and such band-aid solutions will only make matters worse. Of course they should fix all rocket-related game-breaking problems first and foremost but reducing time spend on missions just speeds up the inevitable. They sure did delay that though quite some many times, whether it is due to adding oil&plastic, steel&rockets or destinations much further away. The game will always reach a point where there is not much to do anymore without any major overhaul/feature.

To enable semi-infinite play one should rather implement something like planet hopping, colonizing Terrestrial Planets, Ice Planets/Giants, Volcanic Planets &c with a new class of rocket that can carry all dupes, enough seeds and enough materials (+Printing Pod). Until one decides to "reconquer" the old home. Of course not only the new environment would need to be different to be interesting with an experiences entourage. 

Also only Klei knows when they will actually work on at least new types of asteroids that have been in the worlds folder for eons to allow for different starts at least.

Otherwise, to stretch the game more, there is still the magma biome which has yet to be "opened" and have any raison d'etre besides heating some water into Steam. (while they are at it, they can also purge all Neutronium)

[Oozinator]

1 hour ago, avilmask said:

There is another preview build except qol_1? Because I didn't see any changes in qol_1.

Mhh i thought there was something in the patchnotes, one patch back, but you could be right.