| kerryh | |||||||
| I'd like to see a Print Report order added to the game and also a End of Day Standing Order option to go along with it (but available to all orders). | |||||||
| David Bethel | |||||||
| Do you mean a way to get an update on your position every day ? Cos this is counter to how the game is run, i don't want to see all positions run a day at a time and an end of day order would kind of suggest that. Also there is nothign stopping you stacking a lot of the same orders in a position. | |||||||
| kerryh | |||||||
| Well that would be one use for it. The Print Report with a standing order of End of Day is something I'd stick on each of my starbases as I like to know what's going on at them constantly. Print Report with a standing order of End of Week it something I'd use on my outposts. The other primary thing I wanted the End of Day standing order is Market Buy & Market Sell orders: I hate we a market runs out of something in the middle of the week and you have to wait until it recycles at the end of the week especially if the starbase actually has plenty of the item on hand still (but doesn't want to advertise this fact with a large sell quanity). Basically I want more control of the market list, which is the End of Day standing order would give. Another option would be to add some special options to the market order like Sell/Buy X amount per day or Sell <max of item on hand> per day. You can't stack Market Buy/Sell orders on a starbase as they don't consume TUs (at least I don't think you can). | |||||||
| David Bethel | |||||||
| Have to think bout what to do for markets as end of day orders does not 100% fit into what we have. Also prob handle updates for ops differently - to allow 4 week prints etc. But i agree with the issues | |||||||
| Kurik | |||||||
| How about a new prinout for market updates. ie How many items sold, bought (totals as well) that day. Stock levels, ie how many you have and how any you are selling etc? Get that sent out to each player each day or only if there is a buy or sell order at that starbase? Cheers Phil | |||||||
| Kragnost | |||||||
| Then people would have the information at hand needed to update their markets manually. Nice idea but leads to micro-management on possibly a daily basis, but that sounds like what Kerry is after to a certain extent. The "daily" standing order does sound like a step towards a "play game" button and if it exisited I could see me setting every ship, platform, outpost, agent, operative, ground party and starbase to have a daily "send for update" type order as the updates would cost me nothing. | |||||||
| kerryh | |||||||
Actually tend to get almost daily updates on my ships & GPs as it is and generally daily updates on my starbases already (and I think it's generally a good thing that I do - if I didn't play my ships daily there's a good chance a couple of them would have ended up as debris already). The Print on End of Day standing order merely allow one some flexiability on this. Face folks, regardless of intentions the ability to process most positions daily has made Phoenix into a daily turn cycle game rather then a weekly game for lots of players. Kerry | |||||||
| Dan Reed | |||||||
for ships and GP's maybe (and then not for every one once you've got more than a few). But starbases should not be like that for me.... yes you can get round things and get a report every day, but you get a lot of duplicated information for not a lot of benefit. To my mind, any "mid-week" reports from starbase should only show the results of the action in question that triggered the report. Issue a SA, get the result - only the result. And so on. You can already see the current state of play for your market on the website - and from the sounds of it you may get that back when it changes as well. There is not really a lot of benefit from daily starbase reports other than these - as Lee said, daily standing orders would get perilously close to a "play game" button Dan | |||||||
| David Bethel | |||||||
| Starbases and political updates will be missing the manifest part of their turn soon, but will still have the between turn / orders section. Although it sounds good to get upadtes every day its not good for the long term playabilty of the game. I know from playing polaris that its too much, so i will take steps to stop it. | |||||||
| Rob Alexander | |||||||
| Hi all, I'm with David here, I really don't want to see anything that moves Phoenix closer to true 'daily turnaround'. It's demanding enough as it is, and I don't have that many positions. rob | |||||||
| Kragnost | |||||||
Does this mean that political report updates (i.e. not the mandatory weekly one) will be free, as I believe they are currently charged? I don't want to loose the capacity report, research report, etc from my mid-week starbase updates as I use that information towards the end of a week to use up my remaining capacity, make sure all my mines/factories/resource complexes are correctly allocated, etc. If this comes in for starbases would it also happen for outposts? If so would I have to request an update for an outpost to get the manifest part of the results?? | |||||||
| David Bethel | |||||||
Yup
Not completely convinced on most of it - how does research change from preivous result. I could be tempted to add a mini report for a few things like capacity (to avoid calcualtors coming out). But i'm not doing a full report as its process heavy.
No this should be sorted so you get the whole thing. | |||||||
| kerryh | |||||||
| Well that just sucks. My enjoyment for this game just got knocked down several levels. I'm all for changes/improvements that actually make the game more interesting or better, but this isn't one of them. Okay, enough spleen venting. If I get transferred a starbase or outpost in the middle of the week I need to be able to run a report on it that gets the inventory data so I can see what needs to be done with the thing (or what can be done with it) prior to it's weekly maintenance cycle kicking in. Can you least have an exception for this kind of instance where the report generated upon transfer (I belive you guys got it fix where if you get transferred a position you get an update printout for it) is complete (i.e. includes the manifest/inventory etc)? If the reports are taking to long to run, have you looked at having a DBA take a look at your SQL query strings (you are doing all of the database queries via the database's stored query functions right, rather then running them on your code's side?) and see if they can be optimized? Or run it on bigger hardward - it's amazing how fast a huge app and database can run if you can load them entirely into memory. Also if you're using a modern prog. lang like C++ you could take a look at the bottleneck areas of the code and see if redoing them in assembly would speed things up. Just some thoughts. Kerry | |||||||
| Rob Alexander | |||||||
It depends how you want to play, really. Personally, I don't want to check my positions more than once a week, I don't want to spend that much time on the game. If you can get an advantage by doing so, then that reduces _my_ enjoyment. Therefore from my perspective, this is an improvement. I agree that it would be good to get a full midweek update when a position is transferred. rob | |||||||
| David Bethel | |||||||
I was talking about protecting you from yourself, and that is the general reaction (it would be mine). Information overload is a nightmare, you don't see it coming and then in the end you have to quit cos you hate the game so much.
Bless. If you write the C right == assembler unless you want to access the MMX stuff. Besides as you say all the delay is in the database and yes the solution is more persistance but we don't need that too much yet. Besides we don't suffer from a process time problem, we stuff from me not liking doing anything heavy were its not 100% useful. It should be noted that i come from programming real time (embedded) systems, video compression and the like.
Thats done on the spot so it will not be part of this change. Also i'm not against a mini report, the whole thing is jsut too much. | |||||||
| kerryh | |||||||
| I don't think of the manifest/inventory section as something that will cause information overload. I do know that having to look at a 2 to 4 day old manifest and then at x number of between turn status reports to figure out what has changed on my manifest, so I can get an accurate count of just how many modules of a certain type I have left so I can do my complex builds before the next weekly maintenance cycle will decrease my enjoyment of the game as it increases the time I have to spend on the game. But in principle I agree with want you're doing - I just don't like the impact it's going to cause on my style of play. Basically I need the manifest/inventory on the weekly maintenance report turn and the update/status report turn immediately prior to that turn. I run most of starbases on Monday and like to get a complete report on Friday so I can look at just what I need to do with the starbase over the weekend, since my time availability and net access during the week is chaotic to say the least. This change is just going to make it more difficult for me to play the game, unless you have a solution that gets me an manifest/inventory report the turn/day prior to the weekly maintenance turn? | |||||||
| Kragnost | |||||||
| What about after battle damage? If a starbase is being attacked, each day complexes (e.g. mines/resource) can be destroyed. A player will want to see the complex list and mining/resource sections so they can readjust their complexes as appropriate. I can see that producing full reports on demand may be a load on the system and the worries of information overload. Isn't it the choice of the player what information they want to get? If someone is getting too much information they ask for less updates (or none and just go with one a week). If a player wants full starbase results every day the fact that the system is loaded by the request should not be an issue. Get a bigger, better, faster computer to run the game system on. At the moment I see players having the flexibility to get the information they want, when they want. If they are only interested in the capacity report on a Wednesday, they ask for an update on a Tuesday night and ignore the rest of the info on a Wednesday when they get the results email. In my opinion the system isn't broken (with the exception of political result) so why fix it? |