(for those who just want to see the suggestion, scroll to bottom)
I think it goes without saying... ok, no it doesn't. I know it was part of my big long list of suggestions but I think this one in particular is worth suggesting again.
btw, if you want to know the full list, the link is
http://forum.spaceo.net/index.php/topic,4727.0.htmlright now... what do segs do for you? hold your merchandise and items? you get about 100-1000 and that's all you need for a long long time (unless you trade regularly... then what? 20k?)
ok, 20k being used, what about the other 230k you got?
could put it in workshops? all that does it let you build seg buildings faster... nothing else.
so where does it go? biofarms. for a measly 10 credits per turn, per biofarm. now granted, in the begginning, it's great, in the middle, it's a nice bump up when your using turns for other things. but 100k biofarms only gives 1m a turn, and usually by the time you have that many, you've got ships that cost in the billions, if not trillions. the only real thing with it is to lower the cost of mining, since biofarms gives per turn, and mining takes out per turn, you can get it to cancel each other out and mine for free... but again, at this point, you've probably got enough credits as is.
so my suggestion?
make it so the maximum size ship you can make, is say, take worskhops, or just segments period, and your not allowed create or resupply fleets where there space is over 1000 times the amount of segs you have.
what would this do? it would force players to get segments if they wanna grow. right now segs are just a nice addition, this would make it essential. and where would they get segs from? everywhere... you cang et segs from galaxy, contracts, encounters, exploring (for begginning only... completely worthless later on)
however, you only get what? 500? 5000? segments per mission... if this goes in your going to have people with millions of segments easy. if you take 1% of the person's segments when you attack, and he has 2 million segments, that's 20000 segments in one attack. now figure in you get what? 5%? per attack? that's alot.
the way I see it, back before all these updates, in the classic SO, the main way to grow was segments, and secret base, that's it. which meant segments were actually important, and the only real way to get more, was by attacking other people. what this suggestion can do, is not only put the emphasis BACK on the segments, but KEEP it on the segments. segments that is most easily gotten through PvP, not PvE.
now what ships will this effect? superships will still be the most useful thing, however superships, especially cost effective ones, require segments, lots and lots of segments. swarmers won't be affected, because there individual hull size is so low, however they are really hard to make effective. if they are used a lot, then you will have an actual fleet to keep track of, not an armada of 10 ships. for extra stats on your ship, you can still just pay more credits for those extra few things, tho it will cost you.
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in short, this suggestion is: you cannot use ships that the space is over 1000x times the amount of segs you have