Kenneth Skybound wrote:Oh lovely, you actually misread what I posted. Brilliant. I know there are not going to be slots. Lack of slots as in slots are being removed.
The whole point of the original consideration of stacking bonuses was to handle the fact that otherwise, and without slots, only one of each industry posdule type is needed for a given area of use.
A lot of people do not use every single structure out there - industrialists specialise. That's how you profit, by being the better player at a small number of things, not flailing around with a lot. Almost any group considering and desiring to use the majority of industry posdules would do so either in separate starbases or non-concurrently already.
And that whole "silent delay for up to an hour" is amazing. I mean, it's once again laughing in the face of everyone who has ever worked with starbases and got the mental capacity to understand a one hour cycle. Even the consideration of "Oh, this person has to wait an hour for changes to take place." Industry, as you have said yourself, is about manufacture and research in bulk and at a large scale. One hour is a long time to a frigate pilot firing at another frigate pilot. One hour is a short hop around for any major industrialist as the overwhelming majority of jobs exceed that time and a non-trivial amount exceed it by orders of magnitude.
This is hand waving at it's very best. You don't cancel an entire section of content because some people cannot fathom things happening on a 1 hour cycle. Would you remove the rest of starbase mechanics affected by this 1 hour cycle until it can be very carefully presented to the layest of men? Or would you leave the content in to be used with a note in a description or two explaining there is such a cycle, while working on a way to make it clearer in a later patch?
Changes only taking effect on a long, silent cycle is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with starbases, and we no longer operate in a mindset where that sort of functionality is considered acceptable.
The one-hour tick also poses major problems to any straightforward attempts to get around online/offline shenanigans. Yes, it's relatively straightforward to specify solutions, but in practical terms it did not look likely that we were going to be able to fix this prior to release.
It's also an additional source of complexity and confusion in a system that's already got a lot of moving parts.
Balanced against those downsides, the upsides are that a) it offers a very small additional build cost reduction (this can be accomplished in other ways if the actual cost/benefit is an underlying problem), b) it prevents a market glut of labs, c) it adds a bit more decision-making to tower setup and d) it makes research towers visually more distinctive. If we can get a near-instantaneous update easily, the small cost of adding this feature is just about justified by the upsides. Where that's not practical, it no longer justifies itself, so we cut it (less than an hour's work, including testing).
We want to address b and possibly c; if a is a problem we can tackle that through other means; d is unlikely to have effort invested in it with a fuller rework on the cards.
If you feel like current starbase mechanics are entirely acceptable to you and you'd be happy with more in the same vein, then you've probably got a competitive advantage there against many other players that I'm sure you're leveraging to the fullest, but it's not a development position that we are intending to take.