Planet state saves

[CyrusDaSquid]

Sorry, couldn’t think of a simpler title😅 But anyways, my suggestion is that planets savet the states they were in. For example, you complete the objective, come back to the planet and it’s exactly how younleft it: no hives, all the tunnels you dug ate still there AND: the resorce you mined is gone. This last part will really remove some cheese from this game. I man being able to farm up infinite resorces off of one planet is a bit absurde. But this feature will open up a lot of other options as well: show up with one fighter drone & destroy the objective, and then come back wtha an unarmed harvester drone! Or landing with a drill heavy digger drone & digging up the entire planet, and just switching to a fighter for easy kills! The possibilities are endless!

[Lurkily]

Sometimes I want the mission, or the ore, or destroyed too many collectibles; I don't see a lot of upside to saving the state, unless a mission is really frustrating. (In which case you probably have to rebuild anyway.)

[Baka Red]

I think agree with Lurkily. If planet state would be saved after each attempt, you might end up with systems which cannot be 'solved' (for example you might destroy something you are not supposed to destroy.). Even if the saving would happen only after successful completion, it would cause trouble; in that scenario the saved state would prevent us from testing if some other approach would have worked better than the first solution. Saved state would be realistic and even cool in some ways, but the cons outweight the pros in my opinion. Also, it would most likely bloat our save files.

[Lurkily]

You could always have a 'reset' button for the world, but my objection is more that there isn't a clear benefit to gameplay.

[Lulzer]

1 hour ago, Lurkily said:

You could always have a 'reset' button for the world, but my objection is more that there isn't a clear benefit to gameplay.

I agree with Baka Red but I feel the same way about the gameplay. This game is currently an awesome outlet for that building itch we all seem to share but the gameplay lacks something. Perhaps variety in planets and objectives will help, but we're still missing a strong incentive to keep roaming galaxy after galaxy (other than resources for weapons, which runs out quick).

Maybe parts shouldn't be free? Some kind of currency could be used to have a cost for parts so that you're more limited in what kind of drones you can build, forcing you to get creative with your starter blocks. As you progress you accumulate more currency, buy more blocks, sell older blocks you don't use for half price. This would also mean you might be able to download a drone built by another player but not have the parts to actually build and use it.

I remember playing Robocraft a few years ago. You had basic blocks that were unlimited and free but if you wanted better stuff you needed to buy them. The pool of parts available to you were shared among all of your builds. If Nimbatus went that route it would also mean that you couldn't have dozens of drones in your 'garage'; you would need to dismantle one to create another, and actual compact, well-designed drones would be an advantage. Players would seek to emulate them. Soon there would be more defined drone builds and finding something outside the norm would be a huge advantage to the designer.

[Markus]

Interesting discussion.

As a disclaimer: For a long time the planets in Nimbatus were made in the way that we saved the "progress" or destruction and whenever you came back, everything was as before. When we decided on a more mission-focused gameplay, it became clear to us that saving progress came with too many drawbacks which could be exploited (like spamming simple drones over and over again until you solve it).

When resetting everything, you have to be clever and construct for exactly solving the mission (eventually, when we have more diverse and harder missions). Imagine a random mission like destoying or collecting, and all you have to do is destroy one object, die, and then destroy another object, die, .... over and over until you solved the mission. With everything resetting, we think the game is more challenging and fun. It also prevents the player form creating/reaching a unsolvable situation. We could add a reset-manually function, but then this could be exploited as well  

Yes, the current system can be exploited for harvesting resources. We thought about using saving just for resources, but we're not sure if that's good, because what would be the logic of why resources save and the other destroyed terrain not? So for the time being we stick to the not-saving-planet-progress and reset everything.  (even though is it technically possible to do otherwise, as is was in the game before  )

[Lurkily]

Honestly, you guys are the devs.  The logic can be anything from "The inverse field flux of the quantum entanglement negates the quantum zero-state energy layer of a resource's mass matrix" to "Fairies did it."