Originally by: Batolemaeus

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Edited by: Batolemaeus on 04/07/2010 16:42:07
To be honest, PI is completely unsalvageable.

CCP designed a low level micromanagement design with no higher level strategy at all. It's a carbon copy of pos reactions.

As such, no matter how much you refine the ui, the underlining mechanics prevent the feature from being meaningful in any way.

A better system would work by taking the current one and replacing the micromanagement with a macro view of the planet, managing colonies from a high level strategic view with optional micromanaging. If I could just tell my colonies to extract in a general area, and produce whatever and optionally directly interfere with that process, the system would be much better.
A simple area of influence could represent the area in which you can build, growing by planting special pins (similar to the settlers/anno). When two borders touch, there is a conflict zone (tie-in to dust). Border influence should be influenced by shipping/producing military related hardware, which neatly lays ground work for dust while opening room for territorial disputes over local resources.

The current system lacks any opportunities for high level gameplay, interaction, competition or conflict. It's a purely mechanical system.

Basically, any minigame that i lose to simple recorded mouse movements is garbage. PI is such a "game".

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Originally by: Sebastian Baseesh

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The point is: all the whine about "how much time it takes to restart the processors" is simply not true. I just checked my daily restart routine and watched the time used: 80 seconds for one colony with 12 extractors. This is hardly much, considering that it has to be done only once a day if in 23h mode. So making it even easier is basically giving out ISK for free. If you can't even be bothered to invest 10 minutes a day, why should you get any money at all from it?

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