Melchizedek Kurvora
State War Academy Caldari State
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Posted - 2014.05.31 21:57:00 -
[1] - Quote
I have a couple planets that rely on importing goods. Today I accidentally delivered a shipment of commodities to the wrong planet. Not wanting to lose all my profits by exporting them and then importing them to the correct planet I decided instead to swap what the planets were producing. This made me realize just how clunky the routing system of Planetary Interaction really is. I think it would be a big improvement to the system if two additional route types were added.
There should be a way to set a "Supply" route from a storage facility (storage, launch pad, or command center) to an industry facility. Each cycle the industry facility would pull from the storage facility whatever components it was missing in order to continue production, if the storage facility had any that is. I suppose it is probably quite common to have multiple industry facilities processing the same goods and supplying each of these facilities from the same storage facility. It is very annoying to click back and forth assigning all the routes, even with the double clicking shortcuts. Even if this Supply route was simply a shortcut to create one regular route for each input the facility required it would make things much easier.
In addition to being able to Supply an industry facility, I think storage facilities should be able to set a "Stock" route to another storage facility. I imagine I would be able to select one storage and tell it to route a certain commodity to another storage facility to keep that storage stocked at a certain quantity. As this commodity entered the first storage or left the second, the first facility would feed all it had available to the second until it either reached the route's set quantity or ran out of commodities to send. This would make Expedited Transfers unnecessary for goods being imported for production purposes, but if you really want that in there as a limiting factor or as incentive to build multiple launch pads, the stock option could be only between two Storage Facilities and no launch pads or command centers.
If these were implemented I think it would be simple and painless to set up nice infrastructure that can be kept producing for long periods of time. I could build multiple storage facilities and have them all "Stock" one central storage, which could then "Supply" however many industry facilities I want to connect to it. It would be simple to set up a process that would process commodities through multiple tiers. All I would need to do is have the industries route their products back to the main hub, which also has "Supply" routes to the higher tier industries. It is possible to do this with the system as it is, but it would require making one route for each input for each industry for each storage facility (and of course routing the products back).
If I were to make a simple setup that had two storage facilities supplying three industries making the same three input schematic which then fed back to the main storage facility it would require setting up... 21 routes. If I were to make the same system with my suggestions implemented it would require setting up only 9 routes. If I wanted three storages supplying 15 industries the current system would require setting up 150 routes. The new system would require setting up only 36 routes. Now imagine if with this three-storage 15-industry system the market changed dramatically and I needed to switch products. With the current system I would have to redo all 150 routes. With the suggested changes it would require redoing only 21 routes.
I do not know enough about the system to understand the limitations of the schema and processes involved, but if these changes can be made without too much difficulty I would very much like to see them implemented. |