Flatfingers wrote:Opinion: you certainly could impose costs of both time and money for repair.
However, my feeling is that time is such a valuable commodity that it isn't necessary to also stick players with a financial penalty, or at least not one that's really significant.
One or the other is enough IMO to cause players to consider tactics other than zerging.
well, without repair costs the antidote to zerging caused repair delays is more zerging... as you can just add more ships to step in for the ones in repair.
with repair costs less, better managed and equipped ships would be preferred.
with repair costs its also preferrable to remove old ships which are damaged beyond some treshhold in favour of buying new, better ships and scrapping the old ones.
which reduces the amount of snowballing and makes room for other aspects, such as recycling scrap ships, being a dealer for second hand ships, or interesting scrapyard areas.
Silverware wrote:
Why not both. Have a slider, that you pick when asking for repair.
At the zero mark, you get a (very highly exponential) repair cost, but the repair is instant.
At the 0.5 mark you get 100% cost, 100% time.
At the 1.0 mark, you get 0% cos, but the time is very highly exponential.
Eg:
0.00: $100,000, but it'll be done now.
0.25: $2500, but it'll take a day.
0.50: $500, but it'll take three days.
0.75: $100, but it'll take ten days.
1.00: $0, but it'll take a month.
This lets the player choose where they fall, if they need something now, or if they need it done on the cheap.
Includes time assumed to be scavenging for parts, and re-purposing detritus and broken bits.
In the end, it'll all get your ship repaired, but you lose either more time, or more money.
the basic idea of trading speed vs cost i can agree with, but not with the magnitude of the variability.
you can maybe halve the base repair time with a fast job.
at least for the mechanics behind it.
you can do a fast and wasteful job or a slow efficient job.
or you can allocate less repair capacities to the job and it costs you less resources per time unit but with the same efficiency as with just allocating more capacities.
maybe the efficiency is directly a function of the amount of repair capacities allocated
the size of the job defines an "ideal" amount of workforce to do the job, and anything above that gets diminishing returns in terms of speed and material efficiency.
(modified by some variable on the repair systems)
so doing multiple repair jobs at once over multiple ships would be more efficient material and time wise and repair yards dont just throw all their resources at jobs sequentially.
you can rush a repair job with an oversized (compared to the ship to repair) repair yard, but get lower efficiency out of it.
maybe the ideal work allocation also varies with the size of the damage in addition to the size of the ship?
it theres just a dent or two in your shuttle theres not much point to throw the whole yard at it.
this all of course also applies to the NPC repair yards and their service costs are then modified by market forces, them charging you more for hogging all their capacities